Turbocharging web sites with new PageSpeed Service optimizations | Hacker News Reader

Turbocharging web sites with new PageSpeed Service optimizations

googledevelopers.blogspot.com

29 pointsxur175 comments

The single biggest drag on page speed for the user right now is social buttons (which act more like tracking tags) from G, FB and T - and tags for 3rd party payment systems or affiliate tracking.

The payloads on these tags can be enormous. Stepping through one recently - the tag was pulling down 12 additional scripts including two different versions of jquery - in addition to the jquery version used on the site.

A couple of these tags can make a 400ms page take 4s+.

I made sure to setup my G/FB/T tags to load async. They show up on the page when they are done loading and don't prevent the rest of the page from loading as quickly as possible.

That said, I agree, they are slow to load and it is crazy how much extra stuff they load into the DOM.

I'm taking the approach of putting an image in their place of social buttons, than when a user hovers near the element replacing the image with the working javascript one.

That said, I think PageSpeed Service will only benefit really poorly coded sites who's webmasters aren't tech confident enough to optimise a site correctly.

What happens if someone hovers or clicks on the image and the underlying JS hasn't loaded yet? Also, how will you show the 'count' of Likes? You may wish to reconsider that approach as it sounds like it adds complexity without really benefiting the end user.

PageSpeed is more than just optimization of JS/HTML. It is also about only sending the data which has changed. And really... why should all developers have to worry about doing that optimization as part of their build step when they can get it for 'free' with services like CloudFlare/PageSpeed? Sure, it isn't for everyone, but I can see it being of value for a lot of different sites out there. I love keeping an open mind on stuff like this.

It's unfortunate PageSpeed is still a semi-closed beta; I've been trying to get access for some time now.

You'd think a year would be enough to launch a product (or at least accept everyone that enters the beta, if you want to keep things quiet).

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