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No, You're Not Impatient. The Internet is Getting Slower

Kent Alstad

We live in a world where we expect instant gratification, especially when it comes to the quality of our internet experience. From the ability to have 24/7 access to our financial accounts, “one-click” shopping on eCommerce sites, and of course, searching for answers to the boundless array of questions we have on a daily basis.

However, as quickly as we can access this information right at our fingertips, there is a slight speed bump in doing so. Believe it or not – you aren’t being impatient. The Internet is getting slower and just about everyone is noticing.

So what’s part of the cause for this issue? Page bloat and unoptimized images.

Unoptimized Images Are Bogging Down the User Experience

People browsing the web expect a similar experience to a fast-paced HD TV channel, with intensive graphics, animations and other visual assets, and site designers have largely obliged.

However, there’s been a push-pull dynamic: people also expect websites to load as quickly as the changing of a channel, serving bright, high-resolution images in real-time.

According to data from HTTP Archive, the average website is now 2.1 MB which is twice as large as the average website in 2012. Images, scripts and video make up most of that space.


Source: HTTP Archive

What isn’t helping the cause is the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and even watches that can access the Internet, which lead to incredible fragmentation.

All of these devices come with marketing campaigns promising portable powerhouses and break-neck speed, but don’t speak to the real-world bottlenecks in play, from browsers to bandwidth.

And the Solution Is…?

While coverage of the issues present the challenges adequately, they don’t address the steps that can be taken to address the problem.

If they did, you’d be reading about automation solutions. Using the right web performance optimization (WPO) solution enables faster websites and web-based applications, optimizes images on the fly, and selects the most effective image compression format that the browser can support.

It’s an elegant solution to a complex challenge, but can yield serious gains on Time to Interact (TTI), the measurement of the total load time between the first request and the point where the feature image loads and/or interactive elements can be engaged with. This is a key metric, and the real gauge for site speed.

So, when you are feeling a bit impatient that you’re website isn’t loading quickly enough, remember – it's not you. Web pages simply aren’t loading as quickly as they used to. Just know that an automation solution can address the spinning wheel of interminable loading.

Kent Alstad is VP of Acceleration at Radware.

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No, You're Not Impatient. The Internet is Getting Slower

Kent Alstad

We live in a world where we expect instant gratification, especially when it comes to the quality of our internet experience. From the ability to have 24/7 access to our financial accounts, “one-click” shopping on eCommerce sites, and of course, searching for answers to the boundless array of questions we have on a daily basis.

However, as quickly as we can access this information right at our fingertips, there is a slight speed bump in doing so. Believe it or not – you aren’t being impatient. The Internet is getting slower and just about everyone is noticing.

So what’s part of the cause for this issue? Page bloat and unoptimized images.

Unoptimized Images Are Bogging Down the User Experience

People browsing the web expect a similar experience to a fast-paced HD TV channel, with intensive graphics, animations and other visual assets, and site designers have largely obliged.

However, there’s been a push-pull dynamic: people also expect websites to load as quickly as the changing of a channel, serving bright, high-resolution images in real-time.

According to data from HTTP Archive, the average website is now 2.1 MB which is twice as large as the average website in 2012. Images, scripts and video make up most of that space.


Source: HTTP Archive

What isn’t helping the cause is the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and even watches that can access the Internet, which lead to incredible fragmentation.

All of these devices come with marketing campaigns promising portable powerhouses and break-neck speed, but don’t speak to the real-world bottlenecks in play, from browsers to bandwidth.

And the Solution Is…?

While coverage of the issues present the challenges adequately, they don’t address the steps that can be taken to address the problem.

If they did, you’d be reading about automation solutions. Using the right web performance optimization (WPO) solution enables faster websites and web-based applications, optimizes images on the fly, and selects the most effective image compression format that the browser can support.

It’s an elegant solution to a complex challenge, but can yield serious gains on Time to Interact (TTI), the measurement of the total load time between the first request and the point where the feature image loads and/or interactive elements can be engaged with. This is a key metric, and the real gauge for site speed.

So, when you are feeling a bit impatient that you’re website isn’t loading quickly enough, remember – it's not you. Web pages simply aren’t loading as quickly as they used to. Just know that an automation solution can address the spinning wheel of interminable loading.

Kent Alstad is VP of Acceleration at Radware.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

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 ...