WebPagetest Forums

Been playing around with the speed test trying to get as much juice as possiable got two versions of the site one that has a First View 1.233s
the other First View 2.656s

The one that is slower and has less going on ranks higher?

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120329_34_3RXY1/

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120329_WB_3RXZ8/

can someone explain why? the slow site ranks higher? what am I missing?

Thanks

Jamie

For one, your .co.uk domain is hosted in the United States, and you're testing from the United States. The Amazon S3 domain you're testing your content on, however, is s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com, which is based in Dublin, Ireland. There's bound to be more latency between Dulles-Dublin as compared to Dulles and your US-based host.

If you intend to serve your static site through Amazon AWS, I suggest you set up a CloudFront distribution rather than pulling everything directly from S3, which tends to be slower and has fewer points of presence geographically.

Then again, this may very well be overkill for a simple, small site. If your target market is in the UK, however, it would probably best to host your site there, too.

You're also serving content via HTTPS (SSL) at Amazon, whereas the content on your .co.uk is served via regular HTTP, which is slightly faster (see the long purple bars, which stand for time spent on SSL Negotiation).

Not sure what you mean by "ranks higher". The Page Speed score? It's probably due to the fewer HTTP requests your slower page requires. Load time is more important than the Page Speed score, though -- that's just an indication, not a real measurement.