With the UK General Election taking place in less than a week we decided to take a look at the top election sites and compare their page load times.

The test list included the following popular media sites from the UK: www.yournextmp.com, www.google.co.uk, www.guardian.co.uk, www.itv.com, news.sky.com, news.bbc.co.uk, www.ft.com, www.telegraph.co.uk, www.thestraightchoice.org

About the tests

The tests were performed using AOL's webpagetest.org to measure the page load times from around the world using an Internet Explorer 7 browser.

Other performance statistics were collected using the popular Firefox plugin YSlow. YSlow scores and grades the site based on a set of rules. It also reports key indicators of performance such as the number of page elements and total page size.

Results Summary

The results showed that:

• Out in front at the top of the table we found Google's election site and www.yournextmp.com lead the way with the fastest page load speeds. What is common to both of these sites is that they have the fewest elements on the page with 22 and 14 respectively (compared to an average of 63).
  
  
• In the middle of the table are The Guardian, ITV, Sky, BBC, FT and Telegraph. Page load times for these sites are between 2 and 4 times slower than top 2 sites. What is common to these sites is that the number of page elements is much higher meaning that more roundtrips are needed from the browser to the server to return all the page content. What these sites also have in common is larger page sizes in the region of 319K up to 1MB in size and they make extensive use of Flash for richer experience.
  
  
• At the bottom of the table is www.thestraightchoice.org whose election page weighs in at a massive 2.1MB in size. Because of this, the page load times are 2.5 times slower than those in the middle of the table and about 10 times slower than the top 2. The majority of this is due to the 60+ thumbnail images of leaflets which are loaded.

Full results table

Site URL	Server Time	Browser Time	Yslow Grade	Yslow Score	Size (Kb)	Page elements
http://www.yournextmp.com/	1.1	3.2	D	69	118	14
http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/elections2010/	0.8	5.2	D	69	173	22
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/interactive/2010/apr/05/general-election-map-swingometer	0.7	8.6	F	36	319	72
http://www.itv.com/news/election2010/	1.2	9.1	F	34	1025	82
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Election/Map	0.6	13.4	F	43	952	42
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/election2010/results/default.stm	0.6	14	F	35	476	80
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0d99be8-3dab-11df-bdbb-00144feabdc0.html	2.0	14.7	F	35	533	69
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/2432632/UK-General-Election-2010-political-map.html	0.9	18.1	F	30	877	111
http://www.thestraightchoice.org/	1.3	47.2	E	58	2139.5	74
Average	1.0	14.8		45.4	734.7	62.9

For a comparison of the content on each of these sites see the following:
http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2010/04/the-winners-of-the-election-map-war/
http://www.libdemvoice.org/how-do-the-election-websites-compare-18728.html

Quick tips for improving your site speed

1.       Reduce the number of page elements on each page (JavaScript, images, CSS, Flash etc.)
2.       Reduce the overall size of your pages
3.       Run a speed test at http://www.aptimize.com/website-speed-test
4.       Use YSlow to for further analysis and recommendations
5.       Buy Aptimize to automatically apply many of the YSlow recommendations on the fly without any manual effort.

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