The page timing report lets you check how fast your website loads in the visitor’s browser. It’s an important report for your developers who know how to work with the guts of your site.
In this report, you’ll see four sections:
- Page URL: It helps you see which pages are loading quickly and slowly. You may find out that a particular landing page shows a poor loading speed and work on that page or redirect it to a landing page that works better.
- Location: It’s used to spot areas in which your website is loading significantly slow. You may learn that the audience you care for is living in an area with a poor Internet connection and this area shows up in the locations report with long loading times. Knowing that you may work on preparing an optimized version of your website or landing pages and keep the audience engaged with your site.
- Device: It helps you see the loading speed of your website on different devices and recognize if there are any problems on any of them. You may notice that your site loads slow on Android for example and take steps to optimize it for this type of device.
- Browser: It helps you uncover issues that may happen on various browsers. You may see that a group of visitors, while using Safari for example, experiences slow loading time. Knowing that you can redesign your site to deliver a website shaped for this browser.
To view the report, follow these steps:
- Go to Menu > Analytics.
- Navigate to Reports.
- On the left, click Page timings.
- View the report.
- To access specific sections of the report, click the section name.
- Also, whenever you see a nested dimension in the report, you can click the dimension to dig deeper into data.
- If you want to see two dimensions in a single view, click + and choose a dimension.
Metrics in the report
In the page timing report, you’ll find the following metrics:
- Time to interact: The time from the user request (for example, click a link or submission of the URL in the browser) to the point when page content and main scripts are loaded and the user can interact with the page. It’s the total time of the transaction between the client and the server.
- Time of redirections: The total time of one or more redirects that occurred. Transactions that don’t have any HTTP redirections are not included in calculating the average value.
- Domain lookup time: The time taken to resolve the server’s IP address.
- Server connection time: The time taken to establish a connection with the web server.
- Server response time: The time taken to receive the first byte of response from the server to the browser’s request.
- Time until DOM is ready: The time taken to process the page document HTML and CSS.
- Page rendering time: The time taken to create the render tree, layout, and finally draw the website in the browser.