A year old tool that tracks factors that affect website performance has revealed a decline in Flash media usage during the November 2010 to March 2011 period. Web page speed analyst Steve Sounders said that his recently developed tool, HTTP Archive has shown a two percent decline in Flash usage among the 17,000 web sites it was designed to track.

Prior to November 2010, HTTP Archive was only set to monitor 1,000 web sites and a six-month record of this smaller sample space revealed a 16% drop in the number of Flash files being used.

HTTP Archive is open source and the data is downloadable. Approximately 17,000 top websites are examined every two weeks. The list of URLs is derived from various sources including Alexa, Fortune 500, and Quantcast.

According to Sounders, when it is used, Flash media accounts for, on average 11.3% of the data transfers needed to view a website – the third largest component to be downloaded by a browser after images (60.6%) and scripts (16.5%).

As the number of people who increasingly turn to the web for their information, entertainment, and communication requirements, monitoring web site performance and not just popularity is important. There is a correlation between web site speed and popularity and even simple a priori reasoning would not dispute the assumption that faster loading web sites tend to be the more popular ones.