What is page load time?
Page load time is the time it takes to download and display the entire content of a specific webpage in the visitor’s browser (measured in seconds). The size of your web page can affect many things, like the page load time, user engagement and a business’s bottom line. Page load time, as a web performance metric that directly impacts your Google search engine ranking results. If the file size of a page on your website is too large, visitors may simply leave your website because it takes too long to load.
Load Time Audit
Checking a specific webpage for speed related metrics is easy with tools like pingdom, gtmetrix, Pagespeed Insights or Chrome extensions. Load Time Audit is easy, you just enter your URL and wait for the results. However, when you have tens of pages or hundreds of pages or thousands of pages, things can get annoying and counterproductive fast. This is where owl WECRA jumps in, to save your day and your budget!
Load Time Audit: How much time it takes to load the entire content of ALL your webpages?
A simple audit report
We reduced the audit results in this sample picture, only to the PageSize related column – SIZE (KB) -, with the 10 best / worst sizes to avoid any misunderstandings. Anybody can see clearly the difference in page size! Once these troublesome pages are identified it is easier to drill down to identify the issues, that generate the big page sizes.
Common causes for big page sizes:
- Too many static resources (images, videos, emoticons).
- Non-optimised sizes for mobile (images, videos).
- Too many third-party fonts being loaded.
- Self-hosted embeds (videos, pdf).
- Uncached or not minified Javascripts and stylesheets.
- Content Served Without HTTP Compression.
How big should pages be?
The smaller is your webpage size, the faster it loads! No need to over-optimize, but keep it under the global average 1827 KB for desktop and 1245 KB for mobile:
Load Time Audit: How much time it takes to load EACH of your business critical webpages?
