How to check website loading time?
This article will explain how vital it is to monitor a website’s loading time at regular intervals. It will also demonstrate how to check a website’s loading time across a range of real devices and browsers using a single tool.
Page load time plays a decisive role in determining website rankings. This is no longer a secret because Google considers website speed as a crucial factor before ranking it. This was publicly announced way back in 2010. As a result, a website that loads faster is bound to rank well and observe a significant growth in organic traffic.
Optimizing website speed for mobile browsers is equally important for businesses as mobile web traffic contributes to 52% of total web traffic. Refer to this article on Why page speed matters to learn how speed can be a major differentiator for a website’s growth.
Teams must consider testing a website’s loading time across a range of device-browser combinations at regular intervals. This enables them to gain actionable insights for specific web-pages.
It’s also obvious that calculating some key metrics like Time to first byte (TTFB), Response time, Page load time, DOM processing for each browser can be a cumbersome task.
To begin with, let’s understand what these metrics represent at a high level.
To test the loading time of a website across a range of devices and browsers, teams need a reliable tool. A tool that instantly generates a detailed report that provides actionable insights with respect to key metrics like TTFB, Response time, Page load time, etc.
BrowserStack’s Speed Lab is one such website speed test tool. It allows teams to check a website’s loading time across real desktop and mobile devices as well as browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.).
Steps to Check Website Loading Time
- Visit SpeedLab
- Enter the URL of the website
- Click on the Start button
Once done, the tool will immediately run tests across the most frequently used browsers, devices, and operating systems. The report generated shows test scores evaluated out of 100 for mobile and desktop devices. The report also indicates the fastest and slowest performing device-browser combinations.
The report covers key metrics for each platform and the load time is represented in milliseconds. With such detailed reports, teams can instantly analyze performance bottlenecks for specific device-browser combinations.
One can also instantly run a live test by clicking on the Live Test button adjacent to the device browser combination. It allows users to manually check the loading time of a website on a specific device-browser combination. All these tests are executed on real devices that are hosted on the real device cloud.
