Even if everything
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 5:46 am
Website Performance Metrics ExplainedSummary
Why is website speed important?
By now, you shouldn’t need to be convinced that website speed is crucial for your online business. That’s because website performance has an impact on your brand reputation, SEO ranking, and conversion rates. Here are the main reasons why this happens:
Brand reputation
Let’s be honest, when your website loads slowly, it irritates your visitors and they eventually leave your site. Here are some numbers to back up the argument. According to Google, 53% of visits are abandoned if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The slower your website is, the more likely your visitors are to leave and the less likely they are to come back. If they don't find what they're looking for quickly, they won't interact with your site as they would consider it inaccessible and unreliable.
This directly impacts your brand reputation, as visitors would have a bad impression of your site. And we all know that a negative brand reputation is detrimental to your business's online presence.
SEO Ranking
Google and search engines in general aim to provide web users with the best possible user experience. Website speed is an official and important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, as well as being a crucial part of your website’s UX. If your website is slow, this will definitely affect your SEO ranking, hurt your site’s visibility among users, and eventually, you will start losing traffic to your website.
Conversion rates
If all of this sounds scary, wait until you find out how a slow website can affect your conversion rates, too! The slower your website loads, the bigger the drop in conversion rates. According to a study by Portent, a site that loads in 1 second has a 3x higher conversion rate than a site that loads in 5 seconds. A huge difference in conversions in just a few seconds, right?
How to Measure Your Website's Performance Score
Now that we agree that website speed is a crucial factor for the success of your online presence, let’s explore how to measure your site’s performance score, or what is generally referred to as client-side testing. This type of testing helps evaluate whether your web application is fast enough by testing what happens in the browser.
You can test your website speed with a number of free online tools. Some of the most popular ones include Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, webpagetest.org, and others. All you need to do is go to one of these tools, paste your website/webpage URL, and start the test. The tool will take just a few seconds to display the results.
Now comes the hard part: analysis. What does each metric tell you, and is there any way to improve it?
What Website Speed Metrics Mean and How to Improve Them
Page load time
Page load time is the time it takes for your browser to fully load the requested website. It measures the entire time from entering a URL or clicking a link until the page is finally loaded. Ideally, this should happen in less than 2 seconds.
If your site isn’t hitting this target, your overall page load time can be improved by following the tips for each of the individual metrics below. Additionally, if you’re using WordPress, we recommend our all-in-one SiteGround Optimizer plugin that works on any hosting platform and can save you a lot of time and effort in improving most of your WordPress website’s performance metrics.
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Time to First Byte measures how long it takes for the web browser to receive the first byte of information after sending a request for a resource. A good TTFB result (0.8 seconds or less) means that your browser is responsive. To improve your TTFB, here's what you can do:
Make sure you run your site on the latest PHP version and have proper server-level configuration . At SiteGround, we have already developed a lightning-fast PHP configuration that has lower memory usage and allows the server to process a higher number of queries faster. All of this decreases TTFB and makes web pages load 30% faster on average.
Next, enable full-page caching . This would store (“memorize”) your web pages on the server and serve them to your users the next time they request them. SiteGround customers take advantage of our powerful caching technology by default , which results in up to 5x faster sites.
is optimized at the server level, as mentioned above, visitors located far from the origin server may experience slow TTFB. For this reason and to eliminate TTFB, start using a content delivery network (CDN). The CDN will use a distributed network of servers that are closer to your users and serve them your website content from their closest location. SiteGround has its own built-in CDN that is included for free in all the hosting plans we offer.
However, no matter where you’re hosted, if your website uses WordPress, you indonesia whatsapp number data can download and install our free SiteGround Optimizer plugin . With just a few clicks, you can take advantage of its powerful caching capabilities that can make your site up to 20% faster than comparable plugins.
Time until rendering starts
Time to start rendering (TTSR) measures how long it takes for content (i.e. any elements of the content) to start displaying on the page after the initial request to load the website. A lower TTSR keeps the user’s attention because they see the content quickly. A good result for TTSR is less than 750 milliseconds. If your result isn’t that good, here’s what you can do about it:
First, make sure to keep your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files light by minifying them. Minifying will remove all unnecessary characters from these files. You can do this yourself manually in the source code or use a tool to help you out, in case you are not that tech-savvy. Again, for WordPress sites, our free SiteGround Optimizer plugin has an option to enable it with a single click.
Next, optimize and preload the fonts you are using. To do that, make sure you don’t use too many fonts (<4 is better), embed them in the CSS, and optimize them before uploading them to your website. You can do this manually or with the help of our free SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress where this happens in one click.
Another useful thing you can do is defer JavaScript . By deferring JavaScript, your browser will only render and load JavaScript files after parsing the HTML. This significantly speeds up TTSR, because there’s nothing blocking the process of displaying your website on a screen. Again, you can easily do this with the SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress websites.
Last but not least, make sure you use the HTTP/2 protocol . The HTTP/2 protocol is the latest version of the HTTP protocol and allows browsers to load websites much faster. However, it can be a bit technical to do it yourself, so it’s good to ask your web hosting provider about it. If you’re hosted with SiteGround, the HTTP/2 protocol is enabled by default on our servers.
Time to title
Time to Title measures how long it takes for your website title to be displayed in the browser tab. This tells your website visitors that your site is loading. It is an important metric, because it s
Why is website speed important?
By now, you shouldn’t need to be convinced that website speed is crucial for your online business. That’s because website performance has an impact on your brand reputation, SEO ranking, and conversion rates. Here are the main reasons why this happens:
Brand reputation
Let’s be honest, when your website loads slowly, it irritates your visitors and they eventually leave your site. Here are some numbers to back up the argument. According to Google, 53% of visits are abandoned if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The slower your website is, the more likely your visitors are to leave and the less likely they are to come back. If they don't find what they're looking for quickly, they won't interact with your site as they would consider it inaccessible and unreliable.
This directly impacts your brand reputation, as visitors would have a bad impression of your site. And we all know that a negative brand reputation is detrimental to your business's online presence.
SEO Ranking
Google and search engines in general aim to provide web users with the best possible user experience. Website speed is an official and important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, as well as being a crucial part of your website’s UX. If your website is slow, this will definitely affect your SEO ranking, hurt your site’s visibility among users, and eventually, you will start losing traffic to your website.
Conversion rates
If all of this sounds scary, wait until you find out how a slow website can affect your conversion rates, too! The slower your website loads, the bigger the drop in conversion rates. According to a study by Portent, a site that loads in 1 second has a 3x higher conversion rate than a site that loads in 5 seconds. A huge difference in conversions in just a few seconds, right?
How to Measure Your Website's Performance Score
Now that we agree that website speed is a crucial factor for the success of your online presence, let’s explore how to measure your site’s performance score, or what is generally referred to as client-side testing. This type of testing helps evaluate whether your web application is fast enough by testing what happens in the browser.
You can test your website speed with a number of free online tools. Some of the most popular ones include Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, webpagetest.org, and others. All you need to do is go to one of these tools, paste your website/webpage URL, and start the test. The tool will take just a few seconds to display the results.
Now comes the hard part: analysis. What does each metric tell you, and is there any way to improve it?
What Website Speed Metrics Mean and How to Improve Them
Page load time
Page load time is the time it takes for your browser to fully load the requested website. It measures the entire time from entering a URL or clicking a link until the page is finally loaded. Ideally, this should happen in less than 2 seconds.
If your site isn’t hitting this target, your overall page load time can be improved by following the tips for each of the individual metrics below. Additionally, if you’re using WordPress, we recommend our all-in-one SiteGround Optimizer plugin that works on any hosting platform and can save you a lot of time and effort in improving most of your WordPress website’s performance metrics.
Time to First Byte (TTFB)
Time to First Byte measures how long it takes for the web browser to receive the first byte of information after sending a request for a resource. A good TTFB result (0.8 seconds or less) means that your browser is responsive. To improve your TTFB, here's what you can do:
Make sure you run your site on the latest PHP version and have proper server-level configuration . At SiteGround, we have already developed a lightning-fast PHP configuration that has lower memory usage and allows the server to process a higher number of queries faster. All of this decreases TTFB and makes web pages load 30% faster on average.
Next, enable full-page caching . This would store (“memorize”) your web pages on the server and serve them to your users the next time they request them. SiteGround customers take advantage of our powerful caching technology by default , which results in up to 5x faster sites.
is optimized at the server level, as mentioned above, visitors located far from the origin server may experience slow TTFB. For this reason and to eliminate TTFB, start using a content delivery network (CDN). The CDN will use a distributed network of servers that are closer to your users and serve them your website content from their closest location. SiteGround has its own built-in CDN that is included for free in all the hosting plans we offer.
However, no matter where you’re hosted, if your website uses WordPress, you indonesia whatsapp number data can download and install our free SiteGround Optimizer plugin . With just a few clicks, you can take advantage of its powerful caching capabilities that can make your site up to 20% faster than comparable plugins.
Time until rendering starts
Time to start rendering (TTSR) measures how long it takes for content (i.e. any elements of the content) to start displaying on the page after the initial request to load the website. A lower TTSR keeps the user’s attention because they see the content quickly. A good result for TTSR is less than 750 milliseconds. If your result isn’t that good, here’s what you can do about it:
First, make sure to keep your JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files light by minifying them. Minifying will remove all unnecessary characters from these files. You can do this yourself manually in the source code or use a tool to help you out, in case you are not that tech-savvy. Again, for WordPress sites, our free SiteGround Optimizer plugin has an option to enable it with a single click.
Next, optimize and preload the fonts you are using. To do that, make sure you don’t use too many fonts (<4 is better), embed them in the CSS, and optimize them before uploading them to your website. You can do this manually or with the help of our free SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress where this happens in one click.
Another useful thing you can do is defer JavaScript . By deferring JavaScript, your browser will only render and load JavaScript files after parsing the HTML. This significantly speeds up TTSR, because there’s nothing blocking the process of displaying your website on a screen. Again, you can easily do this with the SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress websites.
Last but not least, make sure you use the HTTP/2 protocol . The HTTP/2 protocol is the latest version of the HTTP protocol and allows browsers to load websites much faster. However, it can be a bit technical to do it yourself, so it’s good to ask your web hosting provider about it. If you’re hosted with SiteGround, the HTTP/2 protocol is enabled by default on our servers.
Time to title
Time to Title measures how long it takes for your website title to be displayed in the browser tab. This tells your website visitors that your site is loading. It is an important metric, because it s