The Head Section: Optimization Candidate
The head part of Web pages is very interesting. It can contain a lot of code while most of it is not visible in the Web page when rendered in a browser. It can contain Meta tags, title tag, comment blocks, style sheet code, links to style sheets, and scripts and it can even contain large chunks of on-page scripts.
The head part of a Web page is a very good candidate to start content optimization. There are elements that must be present in the head tag such as the Title, Meta description and character set declaration. However, elements such as links to scripts and on-page scripts can also be located within the Web page content code and might even make Web pages load faster that way.
The data tables below show head length and document length comparison of two large samples.
| Header and Document Length: General | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Observed Category | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| Header Length | General | 99.63 | 2,639.74 | 43.00 | 209,465.00 | 2,597.00 | 706.43 - 4,896.10 | |
| HTML Document Length | General | 100.00 | 47,263.73 | 1,096.00 | 336,583.00 | 36,904.00 | 14,109.63 - 90,929.45 | |
| Header and Document Length: SE Positions | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observed Element | Observed Category | % Found | Average | Min | Max | Median | 80 Percentile Range | |
| Header Length | Prominent SE Position | 98.80 | 2,428.86 | 13.00 | 42,608.00 | 3,309.57 | 572.23 - 4,680.30 | |
| HTML Document Length | Prominent SE Position | 100.00 | 33,975.02 | 1,623.00 | 254,611.00 | 40,464.86 | 7,978.19 - 70,562.84 | |
The size of the head part is very similar in both categories with Web sites in General category having smaller head section and overall the head section size is approximately 7% of the document size which should be a sign of potential optimization.
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