I thought it would be entertaining to see out of the two biggest search engines, which was the living and breathing personification of their guidelines (Google or Bing), and which was the Bagpuss – “an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams”.
I looked at page load times, as this is the current flavour of the month inside search and webmaster circles. Even Google Analytics now has a page speed service which can perform a number of tests on your website and then report the findings back to you. You can then taken them to your web-agency and ask them why your website is so slow.
I choose to use GT metrix as it is relatively cheap and you can set up monitoring plans that will allow you to compare speed and optimization tests periodically. This means that if you are working with an agency to improve a website, you can benchmark key pages on the website before it goes through the optimization process. Something that is critical to do each time you modify key areas of your website.
Another reason for using the GT Metrix services is that there are lots of helpful resources within the GT Metrix control panel which actually explains the steps of optimizing areas of your website it has found to be weak. While it’s true that you can find this information on the world-wide-web, they pull it all together without having to go and find resources on the web.
So here are the results of the tests.
Google
[click for report in pdf]
Avoid Landing page redirects
To speed up page load times for visitors of your site, remove as many landing page redirections as possible, and make any required redirections cacheable if possible.
- http://www.google.com/ is a non-cacheable redirect to http://www.google.co.uk/
Specify image dimensions
The following image(s) are missing width and/or height attributes.
- http://www.google.co.uk/images/icons/product/chrome-48.png (Dimensions: 48 x 48)
Optimize images
Optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 105B (28% reduction).
- Losslessly compressing http://www.google.com/textinputassistant/tia.png could save 105B (28% reduction). See optimized version
Minify HTML
Minifying the following HTML resources could reduce their size by 175B (1% reduction).
- Minifying http://www.google.co.uk/ could save 175B (1% reduction) after compression.
Bing
[click for report in pdf]
Minify HTML
Minifying the following HTML resources could reduce their size by 133B (1% reduction).
- Minifying http://www.bing.com/ could save 133B (1% reduction) after compression.
Verdict
Who’s the Bagpuss? It will probably not come as any surprise to those working in the web-marketing field that Bing does a better job on page speed than Google. In fact the devil is in the detail. While a fresh browser is caching the 297kb of Google’s homepage, Bing’s homepage is 13 times smaller at a measly 22kb. Bing also loads faster time and the fewer number of requests on the server.
Bing wins on this one.
Just to throw in another bechmark I ran a report on the BBC homepage, because as our heaveanly Father told the webmarketing community speed matters for ranking. You can find the full report by clicking here (pdf).
Author Information
Glyn S. H. has been online marketing since 1999 and has developed campaigns for leading luxury brands that have included Nestlè and Interflora . He works primarily in for the Travel and Tourism sector, helping hotels beat-down OTA paychecks. He has a web-marketing company, a Masters in Professional Communication, speaks fluent Italian, and is married with two kids. He also has a good sense of humour – essential for survival in web-marketing. He is not employed by Google. To contact via email: glyn@ (this domain).
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