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In this post, we will dive into one of the best free tools you can use to measure and improve your site performance: WebPageTest.
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The SEO Expert's Guide to Web Performance UsingWebPageTest Any SEO professional knows that both site performance and user experience play an important rankings and conversion rates. And just like there are great tools to help you find your search rank, research keywords, and track links, there are also excellent tools to help you improve your site performance. In this post, we will dive into one of the best free tools you can use to measure and improve your site performance: WebPageTest. role in search engine There are several key questions an SEO professional should answer when it comes to improving the performance and user experience (UX) of your website: What is my Time To First Byte? Time to first byte (or TTFB) is a measure of how fast the network and webserver returned that first byte of data in the HTML file you requested. The lower this number the better, since it means the site responded quickly. TTFB is an important metric since it is the performance measure most strongly correlated with a page's search ranking. A high TTFB can also indicate an underpowered web server. How quickly does my site render? Have you ever visited a page and then stared at a white screen waiting? Even if your site fully loads in only a few seconds, if the user isn't seeing any progress they have a bad experience. Getting your site to render quickly can make your site "feel" faster than the competition. And speaking of competition... How does my site compare to my competitors? Having a fast site is always a plus, but knowing how fast your site loads relative to your competitors can give you an idea about where you spend your resources and attention.
How does your site respond for mobile users? Sites are increasingly receiving the majority of their traffic from mobile users. When measuring your site performance, its critical you evaluate how well your site performs on mobile devices as well. How do I make my site faster and provide a better UX? Collecting data and metrics is great, but creating a plan of action is even better. In this and a follow up post, we will show you clear steps you can take to improve your site's performance and UX. What does Web Page Test Do? Created originally at AOL by Patrick Meenan in 2008 and now enjoying backing by prominent technology companies like Google, WebPageTest (WPT) is the Swiss army knife for measuring your site's performance. While WPT's capabilities are vast (and sometimes overwhelming), with some guidance you will find that it can be indispensable to improving your site performance. And best of all, WPT is FREE and open sourced under the free BSD license! Testing your site with WebPageTest: To start go ahead and visit www.WebPageTest.org. It's okay to load this URL on your browser of choice (the browser you visit the URL with is NOT the browser used to run the test, that all happens on the remote server in a controlled environment).You should now see a page like this:
Right away you see 2 interesting options: Test Location: has a list of over 40 different regions around the world. Through its partnership program, WPT is physically running (for free) on servers located in all of those locations. When you enter a page URL for testing, the server at the location will load that URL locally with the browser you select. Browser: contains a number of different desktop and mobile browser configurations available for testing at that location. Note that unless otherwise specified, the mobile specific browser tests are actually running on actual mobile devices and not emulators. Go ahead and expand the Advanced Settings section and you'll see something like this: Connection is the simulated connection speed. Doesn't matter too much unless you're doing advanced testing. Just keep the default of Cable 5/1 for now. Number of tests: as the name implies this controls the number of repeat tests to run. This is very important as the Internet can suffer frequent spikes
and jitter in response times based on network congestion (see our earlier post on HTTP/2). To get a reliable result, its best to run multiple samples and have WPT automatically choose the median result. We recommend at least three tests, more if you have the time to wait. Repeat View specifies if each test should load the page just once (with the browser cache cleared), or once with the cache cleared and again with the cache primed. Why does this matter? Whenever your browser visits a URL for the first time, there is almost always a large number of images, JavaScript files and other resources that must first be downloaded by the browser to be used by that page. WebPageTest Results There's a lot to digest in these numbers, so let's stick to the highlights: 1.First Byte: This is the Time-to-first-byte metric we are looking for! As you'll see below, the HTML document is usually a small sliver of the overall time - it's all the images, JavaScript files, etc. that take most of the time to load. You want a number no more than about 200-400 ms. 2.Start Render: This is the point visually where you start seeing something other then a blank white page staring back at you. This also directly maps to a number that we want for our questions above.
3.Document Complete: This is the point where the webpage has loaded up all the initial components of the HTML DOM and you can start interacting with the page (scrolling and such). You may still see images and other background parts of the page continue to "pop in" on the page after this, though. This number is helpful for developers, but less important from an SEO/UX perspective. 4.Fully Loaded:This is the point at which everything is done loading. All images, all tracking beacons, everything. Many websites intentionally design for a faster document complete time (time you can interact with the page) at the expense of a slower fully loaded time. There are raging debates over whether this is a good practice or not, I'll steer clear of those and simply say "do what's best for your users". 5.Speed Index:This is a metric specific to WPT averaging when the visual elements of the page load. This attempts to solve a growing discrepancy between the values above and what the user perceives as "fast". The math behind how it is calculated is kind of cool, and you can learn more about it here. The smaller the number, the faster and more completely you page loads. Seeing how your site loads To access your video, click the Summary tab on your test result, then scroll down and click the Watch Video link on the far right column next to the Test Result you want to view Comparing against your competitors (and yourself) Yes you can! WPT's video capabilities go further, and that's where it gets really interesting: you can also generate side by side videos of your site versus your competition! To do so, repeat the steps above to generate a new test, but now using the URL of your competitor. Run your test and then click Test History.
Scrolling left and right will show a visual comparison of how the 2 pages loaded relative to each other. The gold boxes indicate when visual change occurred on the site getting loaded. Scroll down and you'll see an overlay showing where in the waterfall chart the visual images loaded. Getting even more from WebPageTest Private Instances API Single Point of Failure (SPOF) Testing TCP Dumps Hope that the above SEO guide leads you to a successful web page test and gives you the related results so as to make the improvements and make the site a wonderful experience for explorers.
