Web Performance and the Impact of SPDY, HTTP/2 & QUIC - Part 1

Jean Tunis

As websites continue to advance, the underlying protocols that they run on top of must change in order to meet the demands of user expected page load times. This blog is the first in a 5-part series on APMdigest where I will discuss web application performance and how new protocols like SPDY, HTTP/2, and QUIC will hopefully improve it so we can have happy website users.

Start with Web Performance 101: The Bandwidth Myth

Start with Web Performance 101: 4 Recommendations to Improve Web Performance

So How Are We Doing?

In my last blog, I talked about all the different recommendations I've provided or come across over the years.

How are we doing with that? Are website owners out there listening?

Well, I decided to take a look at the archive — HTTP Archive, that is.

With HTTP Archive, I can look at some worldwide statistics on thousands of websites it monitors.

Let's look at bytes being sent to the browser.


As we can see, the average total byte size of a web page is a little over 2.3MB. And look at the biggest percentage in type of files: images account for about 63% of worldwide page sizes. Those file sizes can be reduced or minimized.

Okay. So maybe that was an outlier. In Performance Engineering, we never want to focus too much on averages. Percentiles and trends are things that give us better insight into whether something should be a concern or not.

So let's look at the trend in the past year.


We see that the trend of transfer sizes has been going up in the past year. Websites across the world have increased in size by about 18%. At this rate, if it continues, in 5 years, websites will increase in size by almost 300%! That's crazy!

While I think this is unlikely to happen with the increased importance placed on web performance, it's unbelievable to think we're increasing at this rate.

In my last blog, I mentioned how important it is to reduce latency. One of the ways to do that is to implement a content delivery network.

So let's see how that's going across the world.


We can see that only about 14% of websites have implemented a Content Delivery Network (CDN). With free CDNs out there, everyone should be using a CDN.

It's also encouraging that we're trending upward on that one.

Now that we get a sense of how websites are doing with HTTP requests across the globe, I want to look at the the protocol itself. If website operators are only slowly making some improvements, what can be done with the protocol itself to help?

Read Web Performance and the Impact of SPDY, HTTP/2 & QUIC - Part 2, covering the limitations of HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.

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Web Performance and the Impact of SPDY, HTTP/2 & QUIC - Part 1

Jean Tunis

As websites continue to advance, the underlying protocols that they run on top of must change in order to meet the demands of user expected page load times. This blog is the first in a 5-part series on APMdigest where I will discuss web application performance and how new protocols like SPDY, HTTP/2, and QUIC will hopefully improve it so we can have happy website users.

Start with Web Performance 101: The Bandwidth Myth

Start with Web Performance 101: 4 Recommendations to Improve Web Performance

So How Are We Doing?

In my last blog, I talked about all the different recommendations I've provided or come across over the years.

How are we doing with that? Are website owners out there listening?

Well, I decided to take a look at the archive — HTTP Archive, that is.

With HTTP Archive, I can look at some worldwide statistics on thousands of websites it monitors.

Let's look at bytes being sent to the browser.


As we can see, the average total byte size of a web page is a little over 2.3MB. And look at the biggest percentage in type of files: images account for about 63% of worldwide page sizes. Those file sizes can be reduced or minimized.

Okay. So maybe that was an outlier. In Performance Engineering, we never want to focus too much on averages. Percentiles and trends are things that give us better insight into whether something should be a concern or not.

So let's look at the trend in the past year.


We see that the trend of transfer sizes has been going up in the past year. Websites across the world have increased in size by about 18%. At this rate, if it continues, in 5 years, websites will increase in size by almost 300%! That's crazy!

While I think this is unlikely to happen with the increased importance placed on web performance, it's unbelievable to think we're increasing at this rate.

In my last blog, I mentioned how important it is to reduce latency. One of the ways to do that is to implement a content delivery network.

So let's see how that's going across the world.


We can see that only about 14% of websites have implemented a Content Delivery Network (CDN). With free CDNs out there, everyone should be using a CDN.

It's also encouraging that we're trending upward on that one.

Now that we get a sense of how websites are doing with HTTP requests across the globe, I want to look at the the protocol itself. If website operators are only slowly making some improvements, what can be done with the protocol itself to help?

Read Web Performance and the Impact of SPDY, HTTP/2 & QUIC - Part 2, covering the limitations of HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1.

Related Links

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

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Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

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