Website’s response time is a very important metric that is highly vital for measuring its overall performance. Basically, it shows how quickly something responds to the request that was sent to it from elsewhere. In the case of websites, response time shows the time between the client request (user’s action, i.e. visiting the webpage) and the response (server’s action, i.e. website loading start), and it is measured in milliseconds.
Therefore, considering its meaning, the site’s response time is a vital metric for its stability and performance measures. Not to mention that it causes a lot of inconveniences to the audience, making the overall user experience worse than it was planned or at least should be.
And following this, it is also of high importance for search engines, because it’s included in measuring the reliability of sites. And you must understand that if response time is slow, then the site’s position in SERP queues will be compromised no matter how much effort you put in its promotion. Many web hosting companies offer tools to monitor the performance of websites, including response time monitoring, as part of their services to ensure consistent and reliable user experiences.
Components of Response Time
There are five main things that are included in response time – DNS lookup, authentication, redirect, TFB (time to first byte) and TLB (time to last byte). Those connectivity steps are inevitable and will take time, although almost unnoticeable. And to understand why response time is so complex, it is important to know what those steps are about.
- DNS lookup. First step that actually includes client request itself, its route to domain name server and then its route to the server IP. Usually this step takes from 20 to 120 milliseconds to complete when the DNS server works well.
- Second step consists of the period that is required to connect and establish a secure connection via TCP or TLS protocol. It is a complex step in itself that could take from 250 and up to 500 milliseconds or even longer if network latency is high.
- Backwards DNS lookup sent by the server to get the most recent data from it about its own status. It could take up to 300 ms of time.
- This step includes the time that passed from the request initial sending and up to its receiving by the server and its recording as actual request data. It can take up to 200 ms to start processing.
- The last component includes the total time between the request and the response received by the client.
All the above included, response time could be up to 1 second or even more. And 1 second is considered a norm by Google services. Therefore, you should optimize everything related to your website to reach the number below 1 second.
Factors Affecting Response Time
There are several things that are affecting the website’s response time. And usually the most impactful one is the hosting service and server itself. Because if it isn’t working well, then your website won’t work well too. Resource mismanagement, hardware issues, poorly configured networking routes, software issues and all other problems with hosting servers could cause your website’s response time to grow. So, you should keep it monitored and make support requests to fix the situation or change your hosting provider for good.
Another thing that affects response time the most is the website itself, precisely its resources and optimization. Simply put, if your website is overloaded with large high-quality media content, resource-demanding extensions and heavyweight poorly optimized databases then it will work slowly and respond slowly. Therefore, it is important to optimize everything before it becomes an issue for response time and other metrics of your website.
Traffic also has an impact on response time, because it literally loads the server and slows down its performance if it reaches its maximum capacity. Moreover, sometimes it happens that your website goes down if its server can’t handle the traffic when there are a lot of visitors. So it is vital to properly assess your audience numbers and be prepared for such things. Especially when you know that there will be an influx of users on some notable days. Like sales weekends, for example.
Response Time Requirements for a Website: Industry Standards and Expectations
Response time, as it was mentioned earlier, can reach up to 1 whole second and sometimes even more. But not all response time values are good for your website and its SERP position. Google precisely states that it can and will affect your website’s ratings. Therefore, Google considers 200 milliseconds or less as a perfect timing for instant response that is good for user experience and your website’s ratings.
If the website is in range between 200 and 1000 (or 1 second) of response time, then it’s still considered as good or at least acceptable. Most users actually won’t notice it or will be satisfied with such a short waiting time. But it is a call for the website’s owner or webmaster to work on improvements.
And when the website reaches the point where its response time is more than 1 second, then its webmaster must check everything thoroughly and look for the sources of problems. From using test website speed worldwide – HostTracker platform and its tools to check server performance and up to wholly optimizing website’s code, assets, databases and third-party APIs integration.
Measuring Response Time: Tools and Methods
To check on your website’s response time you need to use at least two things – Google PageSpeed Insights and a powerful monitoring service with the proper tools to look for various issues. Insights check will show you overall response time and point out whether your website is working well or not. And a powerful monitoring platform will help you with re-checking response time and then pinpointing and fixing the source of problems if there are issues. The latter is especially important for every webmaster, because it provides the required amount of diagnostics data and allows to execute a wide variety of tests and checks.
For instance, HostTracker monitoring platform allows webmasters to run http checker from different locations and has a whole lot of useful tools. From aforementioned response time measuring and up to server performance testing, website database optimization checking and even site’s content loading time checking. Not to mention that it works automatically and has an in-built notifications system that is perfect for long-run monitoring purposes.
Improving Response Time
As it was mentioned, it is a must for you as its owner or webmaster to fix things and improve the response time of the website if it’s lacking. And to improve it to proper and suitable numbers, you need to check everything first to understand what causes it to become long and where the issue is in the first place.
Therefore, it is vital to set up a monitoring routine before you start improvements and make a toolkit like HostTracker check everything on the go while you’ll be working on things that are slowing the response time. And while the system will perform check website availability test on hosttracker along with other tests. you should start fixing things.
As soon as you get the result of the monitoring system’s thorough diagnostics, you will know what you need to fix, And, actually, after you handle the issue, it won’t hurt to improve other aspects of the website’s performance that affect the response time.
- Change web hosting plan or hosting itself. If the website is on a bad hosting or uses an insufficient amount of resources, it will affect its response time for sure. Sometimes it can be really vital, especially if there is a large resource mismanagement and hosting plan or server itself can’t handle the load. Therefore, it’s a must to check everything and send a request to the provider to fix the issue or change the service plan, depending on the situation. Or leave for better and more reliable hosting for good.
- Find a proper CDN. Content Delivery Network is a thing that is a must for every website that works on a scale larger than local. Because it is basically a third-party service that will virtually shorten the route between the website’s server and its faraway users. This will surely reduce the response time. For all of its users, no matter their location.
- Work on content optimization. Large and oversized media is the key to slowing down the website’s response time. Therefore, it’s a must to optimize everything with proper compression methods, folder structure re-organizing, sorting and so on. This way, the website’s users won’t be overloading the server’s resources even if influx happens and traffic peaks up.
- Fix and clean up the webpage code. Yes, webpage code is important for response time, because it’s an actual part of the content. But even if it’s not heavyweight, broken loading order, messed up functions and unnecessary lines of code will affect the response time greatly.
- Reconfigure and optimize databases. Poorly configured and optimized databases, if left unattended, can cause response time to grow on a larger scale than server hardware or software issues. Because the whole process of fetching data according to the request could be messed up badly if optimization is bad or database configuration is wrong.
- Clean up CMS. Yes, rare as it could be, this could be a reason for the website’s response time to become longer. Because sometimes CMS plugins, especially outdated ones, can affect the whole website, response time included, putting a heavy load on server performance. So, it’ll be a good thing to check CMS and replace outdated plugins with newer ones or even find an all-in-one replacement for them. And, of course, it is a must to clean up the unneeded and outdated plugins.
Endnotes
Concluding everything that was mentioned above, the website’s response time – is a complex metric that must be under constant monitoring and maintenance, because it highly affects user experience and SERP ratings. But response time maintenance can be a time-consuming thing if you won’t deal with it properly, with a well-made and powerful toolkit like HostTracker. it will handle checking and testing of the server and website performance while you’ll be working on maintenance itself. And, obviously it’s for the better of your website’s overall success that you’ll keep everything in good condition before something happens.
