Last month we knocked out some quick and dirty code to go through all council websites and get their Google page speed insight scores. So it being a new month we’ve run the code again.
Top 10 ‘fastest’ council websites 1st April 2014
| # | Council | Site | Score | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | eastsussex | http://www.eastsussex.gov.uk | 92 | - |
| 2 | slough | http://www.slough.gov.uk | 91 | +9 |
| 3 | braintree | http://www.braintree.gov.uk | 89 | - |
| 4 | shropshire | http://www.shropshire.gov.uk | 88 | - |
| 5 | nwleicsdc | http://www.nwleicsdc.gov.uk | 88 | -1 |
| 6 | southlanarkshire | http://www.southlanarkshire.gov.uk | 87 | +29 |
| 7 | selby | http://www.selby.gov.uk | 86 | -1 |
| 8 | warwickdc | http://www.warwickdc.gov.uk | 86 | +21 |
| 9 | west-dunbarton | http://www.west-dunbarton.gov.uk | 86 | -1 |
| 10 | pendle | http://www.pendle.gov.uk | 86 | -1 |
What does it mean?
Well, as with last month, not much - but it’s interesting to see the changes. Many of the sites moving up and down are doing so because of nothing more than different images on the pages.
There were a few sites where the change in images in news stories has more than doubled the size of the homepage in the last month. While this might not make a significant difference to many, if your broadband or mobile internet connection isn’t great, its going to change the amount of time it takes to view the site quite significantly.
All the data
When we run the script, it produces a nice big spreadsheet. If you want to see the data, then that’s the place to look.
All the data - speedy check April 2014
Notes about the results:
Welsh sites: If you run against the root of all sites, then a lot of the Welsh sites score really high, but that is because most of them have a splash page asking the user to choose the English or Welsh version of the site. For fairness, I have tested Welsh sites against the English homepage not the splash page.
Open source everything: At Jumoo, we open source everything, so even though the python script is a bit of an abomination, you can go to github and see for yourself what we have done to reach these results.