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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.

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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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...