Barry Hand

Ping­dom have put together the high­lights of 2009, some pretty fas­ci­nat­ing num­bers here.

Inter­net users

• 1.73 bil­lion – Inter­net users world­wide (Sep­tem­ber 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Inter­net users since the pre­vi­ous year.
• 738,257,230 – Inter­net users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Inter­net users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Inter­net users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Inter­net users in Latin Amer­ica / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Inter­net users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Inter­net users in the Mid­dle East.
• 20,970,490 – Inter­net users in Ocea­nia / Australia.

Social Media

• 126 mil­lion – The num­ber of blogs on the Inter­net (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Per­cent of social net­work sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 mil­lion – Num­ber of tweets on Twit­ter per day (Novem­ber, 2009)
• 57% – Per­cent­age of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 mil­lion – Peo­ple fol­low­ing @aplusk (Ash­ton Kutcher, Twitter’s most fol­lowed user).
• 350 mil­lion – Peo­ple on Facebook.
• 50% – Per­cent­age of Face­book users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The num­ber of active Face­book applications.

Web­sites

• 234 mil­lion – The num­ber of web­sites as of Decem­ber 2009.
• 47 mil­lion – Added web­sites in 2009.

More here.…

Bren­dan Hughes’ post on The Effi­ciency Imper­a­tive reminded me of some­thing I’ve touched on briefly before with a tip on speed­ing up Google Ana­lyt­ics by host­ing it locally but Bren­dan does a good job of expand­ing that out to the wider pic­ture of the impor­tance of speed.

So with load time and respon­sive­ness being an extremely impor­tant fac­tor, it’s no sur­prise to see Google on hand to help out devel­op­ers with the addi­tion of Site Per­for­mance under the labs sec­tion of Web­mas­ter Tools. Page load time also impor­tant for Google Adwords and is a new rank­ing fac­tor for Google SEO — two mas­sive rea­sons to sit up and take notice.

This gives a good overview of aver­age page load times for my Wiffy​.ie web­site, 7.1 sec­onds pretty bad.

Of course Big G not only helps you recog­nise the prob­lem but also offers some help­ful suggestions.

Most of these sug­ges­tions would require some web devel­op­ment knowl­edge, so Google rec­om­mend using their Page Speed exten­sion where you can knock your­self tweak­ing your web page. I’d also rec­om­mend the lori exten­tion which shows page load time.

Much of the opti­mi­sa­tion is founded in util­is­ing stuff that proper web devel­op­ers (who know scal­a­bil­ity) would con­sider such as GZip com­pres­sion at the server side, and using a con­tent deliv­ery net­work (CDN) as well as what I would con­sider good prac­tice from web design­ers like com­bin­ing css files, and opti­mis­ing script loads and min­imis­ing unused code

Yahoo also have a great resource with their Best prac­tices for speed­ing up your web­site which puts their 34 best prac­tices into 7 cat­e­gories, and also pro­vide YSlow (sim­i­lar to Page Speed) — so there is a lot of help out there on inves­ti­gat­ing and improv­ing page load times as it’s def­i­nitely going to be a recur­ring theme in 2010.