As traffic to websites surges across the world, it is increasingly critical to have a sense of how your website performs. We make changes to our Los Angeles web hosting set up regularly and often don’t check to see what impact those changes have on site performance. To understand the full impact of these changes, we need to establish a baseline and regularly run performance tests in a way that makes analysis realistic. Here are some examples of important website performance metrics according to Rack Alley:
Time to start render
The amount of time it takes for the website to start rendering in the browser from the time the user requested the site. The number you get here says a lot of about your site and can mean several things if the time is excessive. You could consider reducing the number of assets or changing the structure of your site so that the page will render while other assets are still downloading.
Overall weight
The total weight of your website is the number of bytes that the user downloads to view your site or page. Over the years the size of the average web page has tripled, and anything you can do to minimize the overall weight of the website will improve loading speed. When you measure the overall weight of the website over time, you will notice if there is a sudden or unnecessary increase in page size.
Asset count
The asset count is the total number of assets a browser needs to download to view a website. It is important to measure both weight and asset count as a low weight website might still take a long time to load because of the number of assets, even if they are small.