We have just proceeded to a major update of our knowledge database, that comes with new checkpoints but also important changes on scoring algorithm.
This blog post details the changes and bring some reminders about the DareBoost scores.
If you use our website quality monitoring feature with a quality goal, please think about updating the threshold.
New checkpoints when analyzing your website
A few weeks ago we started to focus on improving explanations given in our reports, especially on the stakes related to each best practices.
I’m glad to announce that today we added 4 new checkpoints.
Duplicate Scripts Detection
Steve Souders, a well-known performance expert has published a few days ago an article about duplicate scripts behavior and usage. In brief, we can take the example of social widgets, that we often use several times on a same page. Unfortunately, a precaution is rarely applied. Indeed, it’s required to check if the related script has already been called previously or not. If you don’t do so, the script will be parsed and executed several times whereas it is not needed. The worst thing is firefox browser will likely download the file several times !
Content-Type Consistency
We have often observed problems with the Content-Type headers (an indication of the type of content sent by a web server, that allows the web browser to know how to behave), which were not consistent with the actually types of sent files. DareBoost now checks that your Content-Type headers are well consistent with related files (based on file extension).
Total Page Weight Limit
We were already penalizing your score for resources that are too heavy. After facing many sites that do not fall in this case, but for which pages weights far exceed 2MB, we decided to apply to them an additional penalty. We take the opportunity to give you information about the distribution by content type of your page weight.
Initially Loaded Images Limit
We found many sites where the number of images is very important, with long pages . We start to penalize excesses on this point, in order to recommend the use of a lazy loading mechanism for images.
Is your website compliant with these best practices? Test your website speed now with DareBoost
Reminder on our scoring mechanism
Before discussing the changes we have just applied on the scoring mechanism, I wanted to remind you of a few things about DareBoost scores.
- the score is computed according to the degree of respect of our best practices on your website
- each best practice has its own coefficient based on its importance
- best practices are relate to the web quality, globally speaking, not only performance related.
- the score is not dependent on your site loading time
- you can evaluate/comment each of our best practices to help us improve our tool :)
New Score for Your Website, New Coefficients
Some of you have told us that it was unfortunate to have too close scores between two sites despite significant quality differences. This is actually something we had in mind for a while.
We have just set up new coefficients, which should improve understanding of the overall score, digging gaps, but also helping to prioritize the suggested optimizations.
For most of our users, this will lead to a decrease of their scores (so do not worry if your score has lost some points, it’s not necessarily related to a change on your website).
We hope this will help you better measure the impact of the problems that we discover on your pages.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here, or contact us through our website!