Is your website loading painfully slow? It’s easy to add new features and plugins to your site, so it’s no wonder if your page load times start to dip. In this article, we’re going to show you the most important page load metrics to start monitoring. This will let you keep sites you are hosting on a Shared Hosting plan quick and responsive!
Find out how to…
In this article, GTMetrix will provide us with example data, but you can use whichever measurement tools you prefer.
Fully Loaded Page Time
The fully loaded page time of your site is how many seconds it took to completely render a page. This number is the most important one, and it should be low. Generally, less than 4 seconds is considered good, but you should be shooting for about 2 seconds for a fully loaded page.
Waterfall
If you get a slow loading page (more than 4 seconds fully loaded), you’ll need to start investigating the causes. A “waterfall” feature will show you every file your website calls into action during load time and how long it took to load each file. This data is incredibly helpful in isolating which specific file is the slow culprit.
Take Action – Notable Warnings And How To Fix Them
You’ve already come a long way toward optimizing your slow site. Now you can take raw data and take some action. Here we will go over some common warnings you might receive in your site report (on GTMetrix at least) and what you can do about it.
Leverage Browser Caching
Leveraging browser caching sounds horribly complicated, but it’s really quite simple. Browser caching basically means you’re allowing your pages to be stored in a user’s browser upon visiting the website for the first time. This means when they return to the page it will load faster. All kinds of page resources can be stored (even parts of a page) so the whole site loads faster.
Good news for WordPress users, it’s really easy to optimize your site for browser caching using a plugin like WP Super Cache. If you have a custom-built site, we’d advise contacting our live support team or your developer or IT person for information about your site can be optimized with caching.
Defer JavaScript Parsing
Deferring JavaScript parsing again sounds like a complicated endeavor, but it basically means that JavaScript files should be loaded after the main page content. JavaScript, in most cases, provides extra features for style or usability on your site. Sometimes it can be used to collect data about how visitors are engaging with your site. But, all in all, these scripts can add some load time to your site, so they should be deferred to running after the main content of your page has already loaded. This way, your visitors will have something to look at while the JavaScript loads in the background.
