SEN Forum Top Pick: Biggest Improvement in Download Speed by Removing ALL Google Stuff.

"After spending a week trying to speed up key web pages using WebPagetest, I found that after optimizing everything I could, they were still nowhere near one second. And they were pages with only 2-3 small images and lots of text. When I checked, the Google items on the page were the main thing slowing it down.

As I tested taking them off one by one, the download speed (all other test factors remaining the same) dropped significantly. The three main items were Google Analytics, Google+ and Google Translator.

I eventually got nearly a 600% decrease in page speed from where I had started at the beginning of the week and down to 0.66 seconds after taking off all the Google stuff."

johnheard SEN's Head Researcher: I'm not at all surprised. I removed a Google+ Button the other day from a wordpress site and improved load time by 3 seconds on Mobile 3G.

That said, today, I tested another site where we removed Facebook Like, G+1, and addthis share plugin completely, we only gained .5 second on mobile even though it removed 30 resources from loading - weird huh? Of course there was some variation to when scripts loaded etc, but this later site was a complex heavily loaded page with lots of images, etc.

I guess my point is sometimes they make a huge difference, sometime's you can get those for free if the browser is busy downloading other resources at the same time.

richardrothhaas: Right. Another site didn't benefit as drastically from removing the Google items but still got easily measurable improvements.

However, it did bring page download to 1 second + a fraction of a second. >Speeds to different cities in different countries on different continents also proved to vary widely.

So what is the benchmark download speed Google will eventually use to decide who is fast and who is not?

The only other thing remaining that I can do is better organize all the content and try to improve sub-categorization to make pages smaller and shorter. It does appear that 1 second or less page download speed is going to be very challenging to achieve.

PayPal's home page's 1m 11s "mktg/wright" MP4 files result in page download speed of at least 6.463s and...