GTmetrix: How to Analyze Your Website’s PageSpeed Performance and Interpret the GTmetrix Report

GTmetrix is a popular tool for analyzing your website’s pagespeed performance. Google considers pagespeed as an important ranking factor in its algorithm. Thus, every website owner should measure and improve pagespeed of their website.

Here GTmetrix comes into play to analyze your website’s pagespeed score and improve on the current performance. 

What is GTmetrix?

GTmetrix is an independent performance testing & monitoring tool that analyzes your website’s pagespeed performance and scores on a scale of 0 to 100 as a percentage and also grades them from A to F based on the performance score and structure score. You also explore the web vitals performance of your website in GTmetrix. 

Let’s see the weightage of the performance score and structure score in the GTmetrix grade.

• Performance score: 60%
• Structure score: 40%

You can customize the GTmetrix testing based on test location, browser, network connection, and others.

How do you measure your website pagespeed performance in GTmetrix?

To analyze the performance of your website in GTmetrix, you need to go through the following steps.

Step 1: After opening GTmetrix in your browser, enter your website’s URL and click on Analyze for your website speed test.

Step 2: After waiting for some time, you can see your website’s and Web Vital’s performance scores.

Below we will interpret the result in detail.

What is a Good PageSpeed Score in GTmetrix?

Gtmetrix score is based on the site speed performance:

• Web page Load time
• Visual stability
• Interactivity.

Let’s see the general guide for the GTmetrix grade based on the performance score.

Difference Between GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights

GTmetrix is the best alternative to Google Pagespeed Insights. While both tools analyze your website’s page load speed, they have some key differences.

How to Interpret GTmetrix Results?

You can see a lot of things that could be overwhelming, this guide would make it easier for you to understand different parts.

Understanding the Summary

The summary tab provides a complete snapshot of your web page’s performance and structure.  

At the top of this summary tab, you can see speed visualization. Here, you can analyze when certain performance metrics such as First Contentful Paint (FCP), Time to First Byte(TTFB), Time to Interact (TTI), Onload Time, and Fully Loaded Time come into play & their time stamps. Hence you can very easily figure out the issues.

Below the visualization section, you will see the Top Issues that actually tell you what you should do to improve your website’s performance. These issues impact your website performance, such as Reducing initial server response time, Avoiding an excessive DOM size, and many more. 

How will RabbitLoader help you in Implementing these Suggestions?

Using RabbitLoader, you can solve these issues without installing any further optimization tools. RabbitLoader has inbuilt strategies to mitigate each suggestion that you can see in GTmetrix. Let’s understand with an example.

As you can see in the above images, the first suggestion is to Reduce the initial server response time. This can be mitigated by implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is available on RabbitLoader. Also, by compressing HTML files, RabbitLoader can Avoid Excessive DOM Size.

You can also use RabbitLoader on your WordPress site, Shopify, PHP, or, Laravel website.

Understanding the Performance

In the performance tab, you can see the two sections:

• Performance Metrics
• Browser Timings

What are the Performance Metrics?

Performance metrics are used to analyze your website’s performance such as loading speed, functionality, and user experience (UX). These performance metrics include:

• First Contentful Paint (FCP): indicating the initial loading progress.

• Time to Interactive (TTI): This performance metric measures the time to become your webpage fully interactive

• Speed Index (SI): indicating how quickly the content of your web page is rendered.

• Total Blocking Time (TBT): This core web vital metric measures the blocking time span for your webpage from responding to user input.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) allows you to calculate the web page loading time for the largest content of your website.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): this performance metric measures the shifting of the content while the page is loaded and rendered.

Depending on the performance you can see different colors and statuses.

What are Browser Timings?

Browser timings represent the different milestones that are reported by the browser. Previously these timings were present in the Timings Tab in GTmetrix with Pagespeed/ YSlow score. These browser timings involve:

• Redirect Duration represents the time to redirect the URLs before your HTML page is fully loaded.

• Connection Duration represents the server connection time to make a request to your web page.

• Backend Duration refers to the time span to generate the server response.

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a performance metric that refers to the summation of the above three timings: “Redirect Duration,”” Connection duration,” and “backend duration.”

• DOM Interactive Time indicates that the user browser has completed HTML loading and parsing and has built the Document Object Model (DOM) tree.

• DOM Content Loaded Time denotes the DOM is ready.

• First Paint is the time at which the browser renders your webpage, such as displaying the background color.

• Onload Time indicates that all the resources of your web page, like images and stylesheets, have been downloaded.

• Fully Loaded Time refers to the time between the completion of your web page’s processing and the absence of network activity for 2 seconds.

Check Also: PageSpeed Optimization Services

Understanding Structure

In the structure section, you can see how much a particular audit affects your pagespeed performance score. Based on the priority, GTmetrix will show you the color code and impact.  

Analyzing Waterfall Chart

In the waterfall chart, you can see the loading of the elements in their loading order, along with the duration and execution time of requests.  There are 5 columns present in this chart: 

• URL: The URL of each requested element like image, scripts, etc.  

• Status: The HTTP response status is returned from the server.  Usually status is 200, indicating okay. Also, you might see the 301 status, indicating a permanent redirect. 

• Domain: This is where the content is coming from. Unless the script or images are loading from another website, you should see your own domain here.

• Size: The file size of each requested content,

• Timeline: Time the browser takes to download/ render the content.

Hovering on the Timeline for each content will open a new pop-up where you can see the different phases of the content’s loading process.

Understanding Video Tab

By clicking on Enable Video and Re-test, you can record the video of your web page loading in other browsers and analyze and detect any visual issues like flickering.

Understanding History

Once you retest your webpage, you can view GTmetrix report data with different graphs to monitor its page speed performance.  

For a better understanding of the History, you need to analyze your website before using RabbitLoader. After implementing the GTmetrix suggestion by using RabbitLoader, you need to retest your website. Then, you can see the improvement of your website. 

7 Simple Ways To Reduce Your Total Page File Size

You can reduce your total page file size in two ways: you can manually implement optimization techniques like compressing the image size, minifying your scripts and CSS stylesheets, reducing unused CSS, generating critical CSS and other performance optimization strategies if you are technically sound or you can you can save your time and effort and just install the RabbitLoader plugin if you are looking for effortless solution.

 A web page is made up of different files, which may include HTML and CSS stylesheets, scripting files like JavaScript, and media files such as images, videos, maps, and other resources. The total page file size can be calculated by adding the sizes of these resource files on the page.

Let’s understand with an example. Your HTML file is 150 kb, and you add a stylesheet of 100 kb to make the page stylish. To make the page attractive, you add two images of 60 kb and 65 kb. And finally add a Javascript file of 50 kb. Therefore, the total page size will be 425kb. 

Let’s learn the importance of reducing the total page file size and see the 7 ways you can reduce your total page file size manually and how effortlessly you can use RabbitLoader to help you to reduce your total page file size. 

Why Do You Need To Reduce Total Page File Size?

According to Backlinko, a larger web page takes 318% more time to display its content fully than a smaller web page. To combat the issue you need to reduce your total page file size in order to improve your website’s loading time, which inturn is essential to improve your user experience. 

By improving user experience, you can typically increase the average on-page time and conversion rate of your website. According to a case study, Vodafone, the leading telecommunication company, reduced the bounce rate by 2% and increased its conversion rate by 5% just by increasing its website’s loading time by 31%.

Reducing the total page file size can significantly mitigate the problem for users with limited data plans on their mobile devices by reducing data usage.

According to Backlinko, the average web page takes 87.84% more time to render its content on mobile than on desktop. To make your website more mobile-friendly, you must reduce your total page file size.

Prioritizing user preference, Google considered PageSpeed as one of the ranking factors in its ranking algorithm. Reduce your total page file size can positively impact your search engine optimization and help you improve your Google search rankings. 

As per a case study report, Carpe increased 10% organic traffic by increasing the loading speed.   

The 7 Ways To Reduce Your Total Page File Size Manually 

If you want to reduce your total page file size manually, it requires a lot of time and coding knowledge, especially in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you don’t have any interest in coding, you must use an optimization tool like RabbitLoader to reduce the total page size.  

Here we will discuss the techniques to reduce the file size, you can implement these techniques by yourself if you are willing to invest some time & learn how to optimize your website or you can install RabbitLoader to implement all these techniques for you.

Reduce The Image Size

Images are one of the most valuable resources on your website. In order to make your website more aesthetically pleasing, you might use high-resolution images which increase your page file size.

To reduce this page size, first, you need to compress the image size losslessly by converting it into modern web formats: AVIF and WebP. An image optimization tool, such as RabbitLoader can convert your images into next-gen formats automatically saving you a lot of manual work & help deliver a better user experience to your visitors.

Minify Your Scripts And CSS Stylesheets  

When it comes to reducing the total page size, the minification of the scripting files and stylesheets can significantly help you by deleting the white spaces, line breaks, and extra comments. To gain more knowledge about resource minification, visit our minify resources blog. 

To minify your scripts and CSS stylesheets, you can use RabbitLoader, UnCSS, YUI compressor, and other optimization tools.    

Reduce Unused CSS

Often developers write CSS in the CSS stylesheets but as the requirements of your website change they might not be needed any longer for your website’s design. This type of style is known as unused CSS and unnecessarily increases the page file size. 

Deleting unused CSS styles from CSS stylesheets can typically reduce the page file size by optimizing CSS files. 

For a manual process for reducing unused CSS, read our previous blog, it’s a bit of a work for you, so if you need an out of the box solution to reduce unused CSS you can rely on RabbitLoader.

Generate Critical CSS

During page rendering, the browser generally loads and parses the entire CSS file, which makes the loading time longer. Generating a separate critical CSS file can improve the initial loading time. 

Along with the other optimization techniques, generating critical CSS plays a crucial role in improving page speed performance. However, most optimization tools are not able to generate critical CSS files, while RabbitLoader identifies your critical CSS and generates a separate file for it, making the size of the CSS around 90% in most cases. 

This reduction is CSSs mean reduction in rendering time and a much faster webpage.

Remove Unused Plugins

According to Backlinko, each third-party script increases the loading time by 34.1 milliseconds. When you install a plugin in your website for optimizing the performance, it automatically increases the page size, resulting in increasing the loading time. 

Therefore, to reduce your total page file size, you need to remove the unused plugins from your website.

Compress Your Resource File

Compressing the resource file is one of the most effective ways to reduce your total page file size. By compressing, you can replace the repeated string with a single pointer. RabbitLoader is able to compress your HTML file.  

Store The Static Resources In The Browser Cache

Browser caching is the most traditional way to reduce the total page size by minimizing the HTTP requests. RabbitLoader can store static resources in the browser cache of your website visitors and reduce the total page file size when they try to open the website next. For more details, see our previous blog.

Reduce Your Total Page File Size with RabbitLoader 

When you come from a non-technical background or want to save your time and cost, the best way to reduce your total page file size is to use RabbitLoader. RabbitLoader is able to implement all optimization strategies mentioned above to help you achieve a near perfect PageSpeed score on the google PageSpeed Insights and pass the Core Web Vitals.

So, if you need to improve your website’s PageSpeed performance by reducing the total page file size, try RabbitLoader now.