How do you flag a long load?

What is a long load?

A long load refers to a web page taking an excessively long time to fully load and display its content to users. This is usually defined as taking longer than 3 seconds to load, as research has shown that users tend to lose patience and abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. However, the exact threshold for what is considered a “long load” can vary based on the complexity of the page, user expectations, and other factors. Generally speaking though, web pages should aim to load in under 3 seconds whenever possible.

Some common causes of long page load times include:

• Too many unoptimized images, videos, animations, etc.
• Excessive third party scripts and trackers
• Overly complex page layouts and designs
• Poor server response times
• Site hosted on an overloaded or underpowered server
• Internet connectivity issues on the user’s end

Long load times frustrate users, hurt web site engagement, and can damage brand perception. No one wants to wait around for slow pages to display – users expect a fast, seamless browsing experience. That’s why it’s important for web developers and digital marketers to identify, diagnose, and resolve long load issues.

How to identify long load issues

There are a few main ways to identify potential long load issues with your web pages:

• User feedback – Pay attention to any user complaints about slow page loads. If multiple people are commenting that your site feels slow, it’s a clear sign you likely have page speed problems.
• Performance monitoring – Use web performance monitoring tools to measure and record your actual site page load times. This will identify any pages consistently taking longer than 3 seconds to load.
• PageSpeed Insights – Run your pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which analyzes page load performance and provides optimization suggestions.
• WebPageTest – Similarly, WebPageTest provides detailed page load diagnostics and performance data to pinpoint issues.
• Pingdom – Pingdom is another useful web page load testing tool you can use to measure page load times from around the world.
• GTmetrix – GTmetrix grades your pages on performance and identifies opportunities to optimize page load speed.

These tools will help you uncover any problematic pages that are loading slowly for users. You can then dive deeper into diagnosing the root causes of the long load issues.

Diagnosing the root cause

Once you’ve identified pages that are slow to load, the next step is diagnosing why. Here are some tips for digging into the root cause:

• Check page weight – Use a tool like Pingdom to measure the total page size including images, scripts, fonts, etc. Excessively large pages can lead to long load times.
• Evaluate server response times – Is the server taking a long time to initially respond to page requests? Slow server response times will delay page loads.
• Review third party script impact – Take inventory of all embedded third party scripts on the page and evaluate their load impact. Too many heavy external scripts can bog down page load.
• Check resource load times – Inspect how long individual page resources (images, CSS, JS, etc.) take to load. Any long loading assets will extend page load time.
• Test with throttling – Simulate a slow network connection and see if page load times increase significantly. If so, it may indicate resources are not optimized for mobile networks.
• Compare pages – Review pages with acceptable load times and compare to problematic pages to identify differences impacting speed.

Dedicated web performance profiling tools like Calibre, SpeedCurve, and Chrome DevTools can provide precise diagnostics on page load waterfalls and resource timing to pinpoint sources of delay. Fixing the identified performance bottlenecks can help reduce page load times.

Prioritizing page load optimizations

Not all page load optimizations provide the same impact. To determine where to focus your efforts, follow these best practices:

• Prioritize critical rendering path – Optimize resources needed to render initial page content first. Defer non-essential resources.
• Compress images – Image compression and resizing can significantly reduce page weight and load times.
• Minify CSS/JS – Use tools to remove whitespace and minify CSS and JS files to reduce their size.
• Optimize scripts – Defer non-critical scripts, remove unnecessary scripts, and optimize script efficiency.
• Reduce server response time – Upgrade server hardware, implement caching, or optimize code to improve backend speed.
• Lazy load – Only load images/frames visible on the initial viewport first. Lazy load the rest on scroll.
• Caching – Leverage caching to avoid re-downloading repeat resources like fonts, scripts, etc.

Focus first on the optimizations that will provide the biggest reduction in critical page load path length. Enabling compression, removing unnecessary code, and optimizing images are good starting points. Measure load times regularly to validate improvements.

Setting performance budgets

To keep page loads fast over time, it’s helpful to establish page performance budgets – limits on maximum page load times and page weights.

For example, you may set targets such as:

• First paint under 1.5 seconds
• DOM interactive under 2.5 seconds
• Total page load under 3 seconds
• Page weight under 2MB
• Max of 10 requests

Set reasonable budgets based on your site complexity and audience. More complex pages may warrant higher thresholds. Buffer’s performance budget rubric provides a good starting point for various site types.

Test against the budgets regularly and fail pages exceeding limits. This prompts further optimization when pages get too heavy or slow. Performance budgets help sustain fast page loads over the long run.

Monitoring page load speed

Continuously monitoring page load speed is important for catching any performance regressions over time. Here are some logging and monitoring approaches:

• Real user monitoring – Track actual user-experienced page load times and performance in the wild.
• Synthetic monitoring – Automated tests that simulate page load experience from multiple regions.
• Performance analytics – Logs to analyze page load waterfalls and resource timing data.
• Visual performance calendars – Dashboards that provide historical page load time visualization.

Tools like SpeedCurve,Calibre, Akamai mPulse, and others can handle real user and synthetic monitoring and provide visual dashboards to spot trends. You can also log performance metrics like first paint and DOM ready times directly in your site analytics.

Set up alerts when pages exceed your established load time budgets. Quickly investigate any performance regressions to prevent prolonged issues frustrating users.

Common optimizations and fixes

Here are some common and impactful fixes for improving page load times:

Image optimization

• Compress images to reduce file size
• Use modern image formats like WebP and AVIF
• Resize image dimensions to needed size
• Lazy load offscreen images
• Serve images in next gen formats from CDN
• Set image dimension attributes for proper layout sizing

Caching

• Add cache headers to set resource caching policies
• Leverage CDN caching
• Fingerprint static asset filenames for long cache life

Code optimization

• Minify HTML/CSS/JS
• Eliminate unnecessary code
• Defer non-critical JS
• Tree shake and bundle modules
• Simplify CSS selectors
• Preconnect to CDNs

Fonts

• Subsetting to only needed glyphs
• Preconnect/prefetch font CDNs
• Self host font files
• Combine icon fonts into SVG

Server optimization

• Upgrade server hardware
• Tune database queries
• Implement server caching
• Minify backend output
• Enable compression

Start with the highest impact optimizations first. Measure page load times before and after each change to validate improvements. Automated performance testing can help evaluate the impact of optimizations.

Common optimization tools

Here are some useful tools for optimizing page speed:

Tool	Purpose
PageSpeed Insights	Analyzes page load performance and suggests optimizations
WebPageTest	Provides detailed page load speed diagnostics
GTmetrix	PageSpeed and YSlow performance analysis
Lighthouse	Chrome extension that audits page performance
Kraken	JavaScript code optimization and compression
TinyPNG	Advanced image compression
SQIP	Generates low quality image placeholders

These free tools provide analysis for discovering optimization opportunities and automate tedious tasks like minification and image compression. They complement monitoring tools to help continually improve page speed.

Most impactful optimizations

If you had to pick just a few performance optimizations to focus on initially, these tend to provide the biggest improvements in page load times:

1. Image compression – Smaller image file sizes have a huge impact on overall page weight and load speed.
2. Code minification – Removing whitespace and compacting files significantly reduces JavaScript, CSS, and HTML payload sizes.
3. Caching – Effective caching prevents re-downloading repeat resources like scripts, stylesheets, and fonts.
4. Lazy loading – Only loading assets in the visible viewport cuts out unnecessary requests.
5. Reducing server response time – A slow backend hampers even the most optimized frontend.

Start with these high return optimizations first before moving on to more advanced techniques. Measure between each change to validate improvements. The goal is to get page load times below 3 seconds.

Common mistakes to avoid

Some common pitfalls that can harm page load performance include:

• Images are not optimized/compressed
• Pages contain too many/oversized images
• Excessive third party scripts/trackers are used
• Scripts are loaded synchronously when possible to defer
• Key fonts are loaded without preconnecting
• No caching set up for static assets
• CSS/JS code is not minified
• Resources that could lazy load are loaded upfront
• Pages have overcomplicated responsive layouts

Avoid these performance antipatterns that add unnecessary bloat and overhead. Optimize existing assets before adding new ones. Every image, script, and font should have a purpose and be optimized. Keep page layouts lean and simple.

Resolving third party performance issues

Sometimes third parties such as ads, social media embeds, or analytics scripts can bog down page performance. Here’s how to resolve:

1. Eliminate unnecessary scripts

Audit all external scripts and remove any that aren’t providing sufficient value to justify the performance hit.

2. Lazy load non-essential scripts

Defer loading scripts that aren’t needed for the initial page render. Load them on user interaction instead.

3. Load scripts asynchronously

Load external scripts asynchronously so they download in parallel without blocking the page render.

4. Isolate scripts in iframes

Isolate heavy third party scripts in iframes to avoid impacting the main page performance.

5. Switch providers or negotiate optimizations

Some providers offer performance optimized versions of their scripts. Discuss options with your vendors.

6. Block problematic scripts

If a script has an outsized performance impact, consider selectively blocking it for a better user experience.

Be vigilant about monitoring and optimizing third party content on your pages for the fastest experience.

A/B testing speed optimizations

Use A/B testing to validate the impact of page speed optimizations on user engagement:

• Set up an experiment with the original slower page as the control.
• Create an optimized variation incorporating faster image loads, improved caching, deferred JS, etc.
• Expose a sampling of users to each version and measure engagement.
• Let the test run for a statistically significant time period.
• Compare key metrics like bounce rates, time on page, conversions between versions.
• Declare a winner if optimized version improves user experience metrics.

This will prove whether your speed optimizations translate into better user engagement. Faster performance doesn’t always equate to improved metrics, so use A/B testing to validate assumptions.

Conclusion

Page load speed has a huge impact on user experience. Follow these tips to uncover, diagnose, monitor and resolve excessive page load times:

• Set performance budgets and fail slow pages
• Monitor real user performance continuously
• Prioritize optimizing images, caching, and critical code
• Diagnose root causes like server response, scripts, etc.
• Lazy load non-essential assets
• Minimize page weight and requests
• Compress images and text assets
• Avoid performance antipatterns
• Fix third party performance issues

Optimizing page speed should be an ongoing process. Continually measure performance, identify opportunities to improve, and test changes with users. Fast performing websites have much higher engagement, conversion rates, and user satisfaction.