How to Read a Website Performance Table

Services and tools such as AOL WebPageTest will provide you with graphs and punchlists of things you need to fix.

Here is how you read them!

Load time is the time that it took to transfer ALL of the page, and for it to stop transferring.

First byte is “how long it took for the beginning of the page to be sent to the browser”

“Start render” is “When the user begins to see a page form.”

Document complete is when the document is usable.

Fully loaded includes anything that loads after Document Complete, such as AJAX calls.

“Requests” are the number of items that had to be sent individually to the browser.

“Bytes in” is the total size of items that had to be sent to the browser.

	Load Time	First Byte	Start Render	Document Complete	Fully Loaded	Requests	Bytes In
First View	4.752s	0.301s	2.558s	4.752s	4.752s	16	590 KB
Repeat View	0.674s	0.425s	0.238s	0.674s	0.920s	6	1 KB

So now that you know what these things mean, you ask, what should I be seeing that I need to improve?

Without a waterfall graph to give you more detail, this graph says that you need to decrease the number of requests and the total bytes in.