Page Performance Metrics

Problem/Motivation

Having a fast website is essential for user experience, your conversion rates and search engine optimisation. While there are many speed test tools for your website, Visitors goes a step further and provides detailed performance analysis for every page on your website as experienced by your real visitors. You can use this information to benchmark your site performance, keep track of changes over time and optimise under-performing pages where necessary.

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

Remaining tasks

User interface changes

API changes

Data model changes

Network time (connectEnd – fetchStart)
How long it takes (in seconds) to connect to server. This includes the time needed to lookup DNS and establish a TCP connection. This value might be 0 after the first request to a domain as the browser might cache the connection.
Server time (responseStart – requestStart)
How long it takes the server (in seconds) to generate page. This is the time between the server receiving the request and starting to serve the response.
Transfer time (responseEnd – responseStart)
How long it takes the browser to download the response from the server. Technically speaking, this is the time between receiving the first byte until the response is complete.
DOM Processing time (domInteractive – domLoading)
How long the browser spends (in seconds) loading the webpage after the response has been fully received and until the user can start interacting with it.
DOM Completion time (domComplete – domInteractive)
How long it takes for the browser to load images/videos and execute any Javascript code listening for the DOMContentLoaded event after the webpage has loaded and a user can already interact with it.
On load time (loadEventEnd – loadEventStart)
How long it takes (in seconds) for the browser to execute Javascript code waiting for the window.load event (when the DOM was completely rendered).
Page load time
How long it takes (in seconds) to load the whole page, from requesting a page until it is fully rendered within the browser. This is the sum of all previous metrics. If you only track one metric this is it! We recommend you aim to keep this under 2 seconds where possible.
Avg. generation time
The average time it took to generate the page. This metric includes the time it took the server to generate the web page. In many cases this will have been manually set up by your analytics admin and developers so it may or may not include the time it took for the visitor to download the response from the server. Either way, the lower this metric is, the faster your website is likely to load for your visitors!