First Byte Time “FBT” findings and research results

[Anton Chigurh]

I put forth much of this same information some time back and was lambasted. Even though I was able to prove it.

I've also found and it is especially true with your site you mention, shoeshow dot com, that the TARGET first byte time is just ridiculous and this skews the grade. The TARGET for that site is 87ms. That's unattainable and nonsensical.

I find this really low TARGET FBT happens on every site that uses a CDN such as cloudflare and Akami, which I see the subject site does use. I believe it is something with the testing that if it detects a CDN it assigns the low target because there is some assumption the CDN improves performance so it tries to grade you on a negative curve. The "false positive" you mention.

If you use a CDN you pretty much have to dismiss poor FBT grades because the TARGET FBT you get is just silly.

And yes, if you have a bloated page (such as this 2.6 megabyte one) you're going to have a poor performing page. It doesn't load in 2 seconds - it might for you because of your caching - but in tests, no.

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150725_PG_4FV/

You can shave 1,529.9 KB (That's 1.5 megabytes) off this bloated page and greatly improve performance, just by optimizing your jpeg images.

Quote:Compress Images: 32/100

2,255.4 KB total in images, target size = 725.4 KB - potential savings = 1,529.9 KB

FAILED - (547.5 KB, compressed = 117.5 KB - savings of 430.0 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1462/0...x_0720.jpg
FAILED - (441.5 KB, compressed = 85.3 KB - savings of 356.1 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1461/0...c_0720.jpg
FAILED - (441.8 KB, compressed = 91.7 KB - savings of 350.1 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1460/0...4_0720.jpg
FAILED - (321.4 KB, compressed = 94.4 KB - savings of 227.0 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1467/s...e_0724.jpg
WARNING - (150.5 KB, compressed = 105.0 KB - savings of 45.5 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1453/0...s_0706.jpg
FAILED - (61.4 KB, compressed = 23.5 KB - savings of 37.9 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/framework/image...39x361.jpg
WARNING - (150.8 KB, compressed = 114.1 KB - savings of 36.8 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1459/6...78x573.jpg
WARNING - (104.9 KB, compressed = 84.1 KB - savings of 20.7 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/COVER/1457/0...d_0706.jpg
FAILED - (9.7 KB, compressed = 2.5 KB - savings of 7.2 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/Products/133...ges_01.jpg
FAILED - (8.3 KB, compressed = 2.2 KB - savings of 6.1 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/Products/133...ges_01.jpg
FAILED - (6.5 KB, compressed = 1.6 KB - savings of 4.8 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/Products/133...ges_01.jpg
FAILED - (5.8 KB, compressed = 1.8 KB - savings of 4.0 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/Products/175...ges_01.jpg
FAILED - (5.3 KB, compressed = 1.7 KB - savings of 3.7 KB) - https://www.shoeshow.com/FS/Products/778...ges_01.jpg

And in this it is demonstrated that CDNs do not improve performance, they do not optimize your site, they merely deliver your un-optimized content and all the bloat, from a location ostensibly nearer to the user than your host server would. It's not a magic bullet for performance. Cutting the bloat, is.

You should get off Akami's nameservers then run a series of tests without it, and be shocked at the difference. Then optimize these images and lose the 1.5 megabytes of unnecessary bloat.