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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, they appear to count loading times of third party stuff (which doesn't affect the display of the main body of content, e.g. the blog post body) as part of the site load time.

This means that if you use Disqus and a few badges from Reddit and the like, even if you set them up so that they don't slow down your main content, Google will hold it against you. That's a little... not great.

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How do you know that? Are you going by the webmasters tool performance page? I'd imagine that view is a very simplified perspective on the actual metrics that search uses for ranking.

weebmaster tools reports 10-20x grater response time than it actually is for one of the pages I maintain (haven't checked the others). So I would also conclude that it measures the time until every last CSS,JS and iframe is loaded. And that is just not right. Ok, I understand that they take CSS into account. But my pages work without JS, and I only use iframe-s to display ads. The point is that my page is readable long before JS files and ads are loaded.

I'd also like to know if they take caching of CSS,JS and image files into account.

Even though I couldn't find out if they do in the Webmaster Tools Report; the Page Speed Analyzer (Firefox Add-on from Google) does take it into account (as does YSlow, another Speed Testing Add-on from Yahoo). I would think that Google would take it into account because checking if something is cachable is easy; and I don't think Google is stupid enough to not check that.

They reportedly said that they would use both the time to get HTML from Googlebot (presumably what Webmaster Tools shows) as well as the time to load the whole page, as measured by people with the Google toolbar. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-counts-site-speed-as-...

Screenshot from my webmasters tool performance page:

http://skitch.com/swombat/n6fwb/webmaster-tools-site-perform...

I hope that's not the metric they're using for search, because it misrepresents the page loading time massively.

There are two things to consider:

1. How fast the server responds and how quickly the page contents (HTML, CSS, JS, etc) are downloaded.

2. How long the rendering of the contents takes. Using blocking JS will slow this down. Using horribly complex CSS selectors would also affect the rendering.

Google Analytics moved to non-blocking loading recently (it's different JS code), which I think is part of a bigger push within Google. Other services should do the same.

What about Flash movies loaded with JS (like swfobject)?

Our load time is penalized on that graph by loading some images asynchronously via javascript. It's a slideshow gallery, so loading them serially this way allows it to start playing faster.

Wouldn't this also have an impact on ad heavy sites, even if the ads load after the content?

Unless they're running adsense, I presume.

That seems an awfully libelous thing to presume.

The good news is that Disqus is trying to hire someone to speed up performance.

http://disqus.theresumator.com/apply/RwUhQj/

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