Site Speed ​​| Gtmetrix

Description GTmetrix

According to a survey by Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers said page speed inevitably has a big impact on their willingness to buy from an online retailer. This explains how important it is for any business with online visibility to prioritize fast loading speed for their websites. For this, GTmetrix is ​​a very advanced online tool that specifically leans its services on analyzing and improving the loading speed of a web page. To find out more, I invite you to continue reading this description.

What is GTmetrix?

As a recap, GTMetrix is ​​a tool that analyzes the speed and performance of web pages in general. The tool then generates Pagespeed and YSlow scores to measure actual page performance.  It’s a free tool that you can use to get detailed reports on your site’s performance.  However, if you want to get more features like unlimited report filters and resource usage graphs, you can try GTmetrix Pro, which starts at $13/month for the individual plan. In any case, any GTmetrix plan will definitely not be an investment you can regret, because here is what you can get or do even with the free plan:

PageSpeed ​​Score Tab

  One of the main characteristics of GTMetrix is ​​the ability to quickly and easily access the key performance indicators of a website.  GTmetrix analyzes your website or page in seconds to provide a report highlighting the loading time. Thus you can also know the total load of your web page in megabytes, that is to say the weight of the files it contains. The idea of ​​helping you understand, through these metrics or information, the performance of your site or web pages. The most important KPI in terms of loading speed is the Pagespeed score that GTmetrix provides as a percentage and ranked in alphabetical order from A to F. This score is obtained through an average of more than 25 measures which each affect the page speed. Thus the GTmetrix report breaks down the overall score of your page’s loading speed into these different metrics. Basically, here’s how the performance score breaks down:

• Loading performance accounts for 55% of the score and also breaks down as follows:

• Content first painted (15%): This metric measures how long the main page content will take to appear to readers. It can be a text, an image or a video;
• Speed ​​Index (15%): This metric measures how quickly your page is visually accessible above the fold;
• Largest Content Paint (25%): This is a performance metric initiated by Lighthouse to better measure the perceived loading experience for users. It is also one of the metrics that make up Google’s Web Vitals;

• Interactivity, which accounts for 40% of this score. This score breaks down as follows:

• Interactivity Time (15%): This is a performance metric that measures how responsive a page is when loading and helps identify situations where a page appears to be interactive, but is not really;
• Total Block Time (25%): This is a performance metric introduced by Lighthouse to measure the total time your webpage has been blocked since the reader’s visit. It is also one of the metrics that make up Google’s Web Vitals. 

• Stability accounting for just 5% of the score share and breaks down as follows:

• Cumulative Layout Shift (5%): This is a Lighthouse metric that measures the perceived visual stability of a loadout i.e. the unexpected movement of web elements on the page as it loads. It is also one of the metrics that make up Google’s Web Vitals, for reference. 

YSlow Tab

In the YSlow tab, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of several common things that can potentially slow down the loading speed of your web pages. So it can be said that Page Speed ​​Score and YSlow generally provide similar information.  Only that Page Speed ​​Score provides data from a configuration based analysis so that you can optimize the speed of your pages while YSlow allows itself to evaluate the problems that can slow down the loading speed so that you can avoid them. Indeed, YSlow highlights the main elements of a page and especially prioritizes server-related improvements rather than the content of the page. In this case, Yslow provides more server-side suggestions like using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) so that content is delivered to a website from the closest available server.  According to YSlow’s suggestions, it is also important to reduce the number of HTTP requests and especially to avoid the use of URL redirects.  Either way, server-side enhancement can significantly positively impact overall website performance.

 Performance Tracking

A great feature of GTMetrix is ​​the ability to view your website’s historical statistics.  This history can be updated each time you run a scan of your website, as well as at scheduled times, so you can get periodic updates on your website’s performance.  You have the possibility to configure your follow-up on a daily, weekly and monthly frequency in order to ensure continuous monitoring of the performance of your website according to your objectives. The tracking is visualized with interactive graphs and is divided into three main areas namely page times, page sizes and number of requests and finally, page speed and YSlow scores.  Graphs can be zoomed or set to a period to show progress over a specific time period and allow analysis of historical data.  Additionally, annotations can be added to the chart, which can provide additional context, such as a website redesign, product launch, or blog post.  You have the option to set up email alerts to be notified of any malfunctions on your website, which can be useful when a piece of content appears to be inadvertently causing performance issues. An additional feature of Performance Tracking is the ability to scan a competitor’s website and compare the results with your own.  By conducting an analysis of our competitors, we can assess the strengths and weaknesses of the website and identify opportunities for improvement. Competitor analysis can highlight an important point that the competitor has overlooked and which gives you the opportunity to gain the advantage. Conversely, the analysis can reveal a shortcoming on your own website and provide suggestions for improvement.

 International Analysis

One of the most overlooked features of GTMetrix is ​​the ability to analyze your website for multiple regions of the world.  GTMetrix offers users the opportunity to test the performance of their website on 28 different servers in seven different locations around the world.  This feature allows us to test the latency of global internet connections, which is especially useful if you are a global brand and international performance is critical.