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Lyubomir Angelov
Lyubomir Angelov

Posted on • Originally published at lyubomir-angelov.com

Vbox7.com - quick performance audit

Intro

I was curious what is the speed performance of Vbox7.com website, a vastly visited website in Bulgaria. Vbox7.com is video platform just like Youtube.com but only with Bulgarian content. In December 2019 the total (desktop, mobile & APPs) visits are 3 200 000, quite a lot, more info you can find on their page here.

Based on that I decided to not spend too much time and do quick performance analysis on the website.

Images

With this number of visits and the huge amount of images and videos played, they should have lots of servers and lots of bandwidth that goes through them.

That's why I went through a few pages using Webpagetest and Cloudinary Image Analysis results.

Logo

The logo is an SVG file, which is very good, but what they can do is to inline it, compress it (remove unnecessary tags, comments, attributes) and make it smaller.

Compression and Format

They can implement a few things for dynamically generated images eg. video posters:
- better compression like mozJPEG for JPEGs
- provide right type and format using <picture> tag - Webp

This should decrease the average total image size per page approximately 2.5 MB!

Lazy load images

Open this Webpagetest result and you will see that this page have ~306 requests, of which 113 are images.

If they implement lazy load on images, the total amount of images per page can drop to ~30!

The CDN

As Patrick Meenan says, most of out there CDNs do not do proper HTTP2 prioritization, thus make slower load times of images and other requests. On this website, the prioritization is terrible.
By simple look how to test http2 prioritization I managed to test their CDN i49.vbox7.com and the results are quote "EPIC FAIL", you can check in the test here.

I will stop here, they have lots of room for performance improvements if you only do a quick look at the pages. :)

Can I ask Why

Why they don't do it, why they are not spending several hours to implement few basic optimisations on the pages and deliver better user experience, less user traffic spent and fewer costs for servers?

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