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

Hot Topics

The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...