Research by developer Patrick Hulce has shown that around 60% of the loading time in a browser is caused by JavaScript code that is used to place adverts or analyse what users do.
Analysed Pages
The researchers analysed data from desktop and mobile versions of a million sites, including many popular ones, and sampled programs written in JavaScript, which is the code that is popularly used not only by developers to make sites interactive, but also by Google to help place ads on pages and analyse user activity.
Two-Thirds of a Second Loading Time Added
The analysis revealed that if ad-placing and analytics JavaScript code are used together on a page this can add more than two-thirds of a second to loading times.
WordAds Script
The JavaScript code that was found to add the most time to page downloads was the WordAds script that’s used in WordPress blogs. This was found to add a staggering 2.5-second delay to the arrival of a page.
Other Causes
The research did acknowledge that there are other popular causes of slow loading pages including network delays, large file sizes for some content, and even ad-blocking programs which increase script execution time.
Problems Caused By Slow-Loading Pages
Slow-loading pages can cause problems such as frustration to (and loss of) visitors from web pages, and pages being penalised by Google’s search rankings for desktop and mobile search results.
Google sends out Google speed updates for mobile search rankings of the slowest of sites on the Internet. The updates are directed to those who have verified properties in Google Search Console and are aimed at reducing the search rankings of really slow mobile pages. The updates give site admins recommendations about how to measure and fix slow-loading page problems. In October 2018 for example, Google announced that it had begun (since July 2018) incorporating a new Speed update algorithm in the mobile search results as a search ranking factor.
Run A Test
It has long been known that JavaScript can add extra time to page downloads. If you’d like to check whether your pages are being slowed down by JavaScript you can, for example, go to https://www.webpagetest.org/ or Google’s https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.
What Does This Mean For Your Business?
Slow-loading web pages can frustrate users and lose your business customers, as well as damaging the position of your web pages in Google search results. Web pages that load quickly are known to have longer average session times, lower bounce rates, and higher viewability, and Google suggests that a good target time in which a page should load is under 2 seconds.
Test tools such as webpagetest.org are good ways to see how your pages currently perform. Ways to improve slowness caused by JavaScript include only loading the JavaScript needed for the current page / prioritizing what a user will need and lazy-loading the rest with code-splitting and optimizing JavaScript. If, for example, you have a WordPress website, you can use plugins to help reduce your page load time.