Tag positions give 60 per cent difference in download speeds
A user experience test by content management solution provider TagMan has found discrepancies of up to 60 per cent in the page download speeds caused by differing tag positions. Best performance was found from a Javascript call at the top of the page head, with the worst performance coming from an image pixel inside an iframe at the bottom of the page.
The vendor undertook its study as part of an ongoing consideration of best practice in technical and marketing aspects of Web usage. It examined the impact on page loading from two sites, Askaprice.com, a lead generation site asking users to suggest a price they would pay for a car, and hecklerspray.com, a US celebrity news and gossip website.
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Different types of tags were used at different positions in the page using JavaScript, with some written directly into the page and others written inside iframes. The latter mimics popular tagging solutions, such as Atlas and DoubleClick.
Page-weight emerged as the biggest factor in the size of discrepancies – 10 per cent of traffic is lost for every second it takes for a page to load. Reporting levels are also impacted, with iframes showing 10 to 30 per cent less traffic than JavaScript tags at the end of the page body lead. Conversely, moving Google Analytics from the bottom to the top of the page increased reported traffic by 20 per cent.
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