Page loading time

Analytics

When it comes to website performance, there are a lot of important metrics, but one that is sometimes overlooked but incredibly important particularly if you want to rank on search engines is the page loading time.

Here's everything you need to know about this metric.

TRACK YOUR PAGE LOADING TIME!

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Templates using this KPI
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Integrations using this KPI

What is page loading time?

The page loading time is quite simply the average amount of time it takes for a website page to show up on your screen. It's calculated from when the page is clicked on (from search engines or other links) to when the page is fully loaded in the web browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc). It’s just as important, if not more, for your site visitors on mobile devices and on desktop.

Your page speed can look like your website doesn’t function properly, this can have an impact as a ranking factor on search engines, and you can lose mobile users and desktop users very fast.

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5 Omnichannel Metrics Marketers Must Measure for Success

How to calculate your page loading time

There are multiple ways to calculate your page loading time, you can use the data from Google Analytics, Google’s pagespeed insights, there are also a number of wordpress plugins, and website speed test tools you can choose from.

You page speed can depend on your web server, web hosting tool, javascript files, CSS files, Content delivery network (cdn), image resolution, and more.

What is a good page loading time?

The faster the better, but as a general rule of thumb we want the page to take less than 2 seconds to load. For mobile sites it’s even better to be faster than that, as speed is very important on mobile devices.

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What is a bad page loading time?

According to Pingdom’s case study in 2018, as soon as the page load time surpasses 3 seconds, the bounce rate soars, to 38% by the time it hits 5 seconds! So needless to say, you want to stay below 3 seconds.

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Page loading time KPI examples & templates

Your page loading time can be added to multiple different types of reports. Here are some of them:

See this KPI in action here!

See this KPI in action here!

Google analytics report template

A report with all the most important Google analytics metrics. Track all your web analytics, from single-page metrics, page load time, organic searches, landing page data, total number of sessions, and more.

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Digital marketing report template

From SEO to social media and PPC, this report gives you a good view of all online performance metrics. Get insights on user experience and figure out your digital marketing next steps.

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Ecommerce report template

A report with all the most important metrics for your eCommerce website, like bounce rate, shopping cart abandonment, and total revenue. Optimize your product pages to get better results in your report!

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Page loading time best practices

Avoid a slow website by improving your page load time. Here are some of the best practices you should keep in mind while optimizing your page load time.

Image optimization and cache

The images on your site can take up a lot of bandwidth. One of the things that can really slow down your website are high resolution images. A good way to optimize your images is to use a tool like tiny PNG to have all your image file size reduced and have them in PNG instead of Jpeg.

Your web page’s image files, CSS, stylesheet and Javascript files load with your site, by using cache, your browser can store these resources or files for subsequent requests and make your page speed faster. You can also use Gzip to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files.

Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML

Increase your page speed by optimizing your code, your web development team can remove the unnecessary spaces, commas, etc. You can also remove code comments, formatting, and unused code.

Reduce redirects

Each time a page redirects to another page, your visitor faces additional time waiting for the HTTP request-response cycle to complete. By reducing the redirects, you won’t have that second delay and overall response time.

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