Much is said about site loading, and it is recommended to use tools such as Pagespeed or Google Test My site. Indeed, these sites generate reports that can help you better understand what the causes of a possible slowness are, but they don't really give you a conclusive analysis. This can lead you to think that your site is full of errors, when in reality there may be a problem generated by some partner/integration, increasing the loading time of your site.
First, let's see how things work and perform a loading test on Page Speed.
It tests both desktop and mobile, providing some metrics:
- Mobile Analysis:
- Desktop Analysis:
PageSpeed will indicate what's not working well on your site:
The Leverage Browser Cache, indicates everything that has no cache, so it has no re-cache.
Enable Compression highlights files that need to be compressed, but people often ignore this fact.
PageSpeed will give you a lot of data that you will probably not understand very well, or that are things that are not possible to do.
Now, what about my way of analyzing page speed?
First, using mega-master-blaster Pingdom.
I have been using this app for about 5 years now and I will explain why I like it so much.
It is simple and, at the same time, complete, presenting information such as load time, page size and total requests.
For desktop versions:
- Ideal load time: max 8 seconds
- Ideal page size: max 5 mb
For mobile versions:
- Ideal load time: max 3 seconds
- Ideal Page Size: max 3 mb
O Pingdom is smart when analyzing the content of your site:
If we analyze the Content Type, we see that most of the loading is via javascript, and that only 74% of the content on your site is from partners/integrations. Interesting, isn't it?
Is everything you have on your site essential? Let's look at Request is basically everything that loads on your site, and can take you down.
On the screen below, change Sort by to Load Time, you will be able to see which scripts make your site take longer to load:
Based on this, you can tell if you have old stuff running on your site, if you are using something that doesn't bring results, or even if your development team is installing components that compromise the loading and cause your site to lose users.
I also recommend running a Sort by for File Size, which will indicate if there are too big files on your site that need compression.
It is always a good idea to make sure your DNS is responsive, as this can impact your loading by up to 1s.
