performance testing Part A

While there are many great tools for measuring website loading performance such as Pingdom we use GTMetrix 98% of the time so for the purposes of keeping this post short I’ll focus on that. 

Setup – Easy but here are a few tips:

• Make sure you select the closest testing server to your main area – we use their Dallas server
• Turn off “Stop Test On Load” which doesn’t tell you the fully loaded time.
• Pay attention to the device detail when testing in the “using” section
• Use an unthrottled connection in most cases

Performance Scores

• Take the grades with a grain of salt.  For example you will get penalized if your images aren’t absolutely compressed as possible but in many cases you don’t want to overdo the compression because the image quality will suffer.  This will be covered in more advanced articles but your main focus is load time and “RUMS”
  
  
• Fully loaded time should fall under 4.5 seconds and “RUMS” located in the TIMINGS tab should be under 1000.  The RUMS index is the perceived load time – as in when the site visitor visually sees everything critical loaded in the initial “above the fold”
  screen.
  Rums is actually the most important benchmark as if it appears to load fast to the site visitor (even though some components are actually still loading) then you are in good shape.