Like for example, I, myself will definitely not wait for a website's page that will going to load for a lifetime. I am very sure that there are a lot more website out there that can satisfy my needs and will not going to waste my time.
Good thing for us, there are a lot of offered services online that we can use to check if our website is loading fast enough for our readers or customers or not. These tools will also let us know what is or are the reason(s) why our website is loading slower and what should we do to make its loading time faster to the fullest.
For these tutorial I have collected various websites that offer free checking of website's loading time. And like I have said, these tools will definitely allow us to focus on things that are unnecessary and should be removed on our website or blog to be able to make it load more faster.
NEEDED:
a. A website or blog to test
b. Website loading time checker
TOOLS:
Pingdom Tools - this will allow us to check our website's loading time. The tool will give us the our website's Performance Grade, Page size, Load Time, and the Requests. As you can see on the image below which is the homepage of sharingthat.xyz, Its overall performance grade is 73 (c), the homepage's size is 2.3 MB, the loading time is 2.83 seconds, and the requests are over 90.
For the Performance Grade, I can say that my website's homepage loading time is not that fast enough because its not graded by the tool as A or B but only C. For the Page size, since it is the homepage there are a lot of thumbnails or photos on it as well as javascripts that are leading to different and many requests which are over 90 requests.
Pingdom also created a grading for the improvement of my website's homepage performance as you can see on the image below.
For the Reduce DNS Lookup my website was graded F or zero which is too low as well as the Add expires headers, make fewer HTTP requests, and compress components with gzip. For the avoid URL redirects I got D grade or 70. The highest are the use cookie-free domains which is B grade or 85, and the avoid empty src or href which is A grade or 100.
Each of the suggestions for the improve page performance are defined by Pingdom for us to be able to know what a Reduce DNS lookups, add expires headers, etc means. And you can see all the definitions below.
Reduce DNS lookups
The Domain Name System (DNS) maps hostnames to IP addresses, just like phonebooks map people's names to their phone numbers. When you type URL www.yahoo.com into the browser, the browser contacts a DNS resolver that returns the server's IP address. DNS has a cost; typically it takes 20 to 120 milliseconds for it to look up the IP address for a hostname. The browser cannot download anything from the host until the lookup completes.
Add Expires header
Web pages are becoming increasingly complex with more scripts, style sheets, images, and Flash on them. A first-time visit to a page may require several HTTP requests to load all the components. By using Expires headers these components become cacheable, which avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on subsequent page views. Expires headers are most often associated with images, but they can and should be used on all page components including scripts, style sheets, and Flash.
Make fewer HTTP requests
Decreasing the number of components on a page reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page, resulting in faster page loads. Some ways to reduce the number of components include: combine files, combine multiple scripts into one script, combine multiple CSS files into one style sheet, and use CSS Sprites and image maps.
Compress components with gzip
Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today's Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.
Avoid URL redirects
URL redirects are made using HTTP status codes 301 and 302. They tell the browser to go to another location. Inserting a redirect between the user and the final HTML document delays everything on the page since nothing on the page can be rendered and no components can be downloaded until the HTML document arrives.
Use cookie-free domains
When the browser requests a static image and sends cookies with the request, the server ignores the cookies. These cookies are unnecessary network traffic. To workaround this problem, make sure that static components are requested with cookie-free requests by creating a subdomain and hosting them there.
Avoid empty src or href
You may expect a browser to do nothing when it encounters an empty image src. However, it is not the case in most browsers. IE makes a request to the directory in which the page is located; Safari, Chrome, Firefox 3 and earlier make a request to the actual page itself. This behavior could possibly corrupt user data, waste server computing cycles generating a page that will never be viewed, and in the worst case, cripple your servers by sending a large amount of unexpected traffic.
For the Response Code and Responses, refer to the image below:
For 200 OK there are 82 responses, 3 301 for the Moved Permanently, 1 for 302 Found, and 6 for the 403 Forbidden. For a total of 92 responses. Pingdom also also defined these different kind of responses code as follows:
200 OK - indicates that the request has succeeded
301 Moved Permanently - indicates that the target resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future reference to this resource ought to use one of the enclosed URIs.
302 Found - indicates that the target resource resides temporarily under a different URI.
403 Forbidden - indicates that the server understood the request but refuses to authorize it.
The good thing about the Pingdom Tool is it will also show you the Content size by content type, Content size by domain, Request by content type and Requests by domain. These include all the sizes of images, scripts, html, font, xhr, css, and even redirects as you can see in the image below.
Lastly, the details for all the File Requests, as you can see in the image below.
I will admit that most of the terms mentioned above are familiar to me. But the simple thoughts that I got is that, I really need to upload images with small sizes. Since, I am only using blogger as my platform for my website, it is inevitable that my images will be hosted in blogspot.com which is also under blogger and this will create to many requests that can cause some slowdown of my website's loading time.
On the other hand, here are the other Tools that you can also use to check your website's loading time other than Pingdom.
GTMetrix
WebPagetest
Uptrends
Google PageSpeed Insights
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