With the election tomorrow I though I would take a look at how the 3 main parties websites are performing.

The test list included: www.labour.org.uk, www.libdems.org.uk and www.conservatives.com

About the tests
The tests were performed using AOL's webpagetest.org to measure the page load times from the UK using an Internet Explorer 7 browser on a 1.5MBps ASDL connection.

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:

• The Lib Dems have the fastest site with page load times of 2.5 seconds. They also have the best YSlow score and grade. This is because they have the most compact page (236K) and the fewest page elements to load (16 elements)
• Labour and the Conservatives have similar numbers of page elements (~40) , page sizes (~0.5MB) and the same YSlow grades (F). Based on this you might expect similar page load times. However as you can see the Conservatives site is taking 50 seconds to load (this is based on 5 measurements taken over a period of 2 hours today and averaged).
• The reason for the Conservative site being so slow doesn't seem to be due to the page size or number of page elements but appears to be down to a slow response from the web server. This could be due to more undecided voters hitting their site or it may be that the back-end hardware or software hasn't been designed and tested to handle the unexpected load. Whether this affects the results at the polls we will find out tomorrow!

Full results table

Site	Page load time First View Now (secs)	Page load time Repeat View Now (secs)	Yslow Grade	Yslow Score	Size (Kb)	Page elements
www.labour.org.uk	6	1.7	F	39	590	42
www.libdems.org.uk	2.5	5.9	D	66	236	16
www.conservatives.com	50.1	13.6	F	36	484	39

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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