Hilton Improves Page Load Times and Moves Up on Performance Index
This month’s big movers on the Keynote Lodging Performance Index were Hilton Hotels and Accor Hotels.
Hilton finally lifted itself from the bottom two on the index after some site improvements were made, reducing its home page load time from an average of seven seconds to just over four seconds.
Hilton’s improvement seems to be due to back end and network improvements as well as better management of third parties. Through a combination of these areas, it was able to increase the throughput of the site without significantly changing the overall size and composition of the home page.
Hilton’s site relies heavily on third party content, which always has the potential to affect the “Time to Interactive” – the time it takes before you can do something like click, log on or swipe a page. We see after September 13th that the delays on the Hilton home page due to third party slowdowns were significantly decreased.
This improves the Time to Interactive although the Time to First Paint (when content first appears on a site) remained consistent and still under one second.
Accor Hotels moved in the other direction, from a four to five second load time to over six seconds. This slowdown was due in part by a site change that saw the number of objects go from an average of 117 to 136 and page size from 1.1MB to 1.3 MB.
Note:
Anyone can also sign up for a free weekly email delivery of the Index. Use it to track how your company’s performance is doing against the competition, or just to follow what some of the major names are setting as performance standards. Keynote runs a large number of US and global Indexes, across a range of industries and government, which many organizations use as the benchmark to achieve their own optimum Web performance.
The Keynote Lodging Performance Index measures and benchmarks the performance of the home pages of the major hotel and travel booking sites from the ten largest US metropolitan areas (Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, DC) on high-speed links attached to key points on the largest US Internet Service Provider (ISP) backbones. Sites are measured every fifteen minutes.
Hilton finally lifted itself from the bottom two on the index after some site improvements were made, reducing its home page load time from an average of seven seconds to just over four seconds.
Hilton’s improvement seems to be due to back end and network improvements as well as better management of third parties. Through a combination of these areas, it was able to increase the throughput of the site without significantly changing the overall size and composition of the home page.
Hilton’s site relies heavily on third party content, which always has the potential to affect the “Time to Interactive” – the time it takes before you can do something like click, log on or swipe a page. We see after September 13th that the delays on the Hilton home page due to third party slowdowns were significantly decreased.
This improves the Time to Interactive although the Time to First Paint (when content first appears on a site) remained consistent and still under one second.
Accor Hotels moved in the other direction, from a four to five second load time to over six seconds. This slowdown was due in part by a site change that saw the number of objects go from an average of 117 to 136 and page size from 1.1MB to 1.3 MB.
Note:
Anyone can also sign up for a free weekly email delivery of the Index. Use it to track how your company’s performance is doing against the competition, or just to follow what some of the major names are setting as performance standards. Keynote runs a large number of US and global Indexes, across a range of industries and government, which many organizations use as the benchmark to achieve their own optimum Web performance.
The Keynote Lodging Performance Index measures and benchmarks the performance of the home pages of the major hotel and travel booking sites from the ten largest US metropolitan areas (Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, DC) on high-speed links attached to key points on the largest US Internet Service Provider (ISP) backbones. Sites are measured every fifteen minutes.