Admin’s Toolbox: Webpage elements download timing analysis
A new interesting online tool helps you to analyze how a browser downloads the elements of a page. All single HTTP requests with their timing are shown in an easy to read graph.
The service is Octagate SiteTimer and is offered by a swedish company. The test is actually performed from a server in sweden, so e.g. for sites in the US you will see slightly longer requests times.
For each element of the webpage the colorful bars show the time it takes for a browser
- to connect to the server (yellow)
- to receive the first byte (green)
- to receive the last byte (end of blue bar blue).
Also for each item it is shown whether the transfer is compressed by gzip encoding. When looking at the screenshot above we can see that our website currently does not perform GZIP compression on the Style Sheet (CSS) files. We will enable asap as this will speed up the third request.