Avg Page Load Time Increase After Responsive Web Design

[JMSCC]

The Avg. Page Load Time has been steadily increasing after our website went responsive. What could have cause this?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Did you outsource the project or you have in-house team? Also, how do you get this information - Google Analytics or actual loading times in "Web Inspector" or something?

The reason it can be increasing is if while rebuilding the website developers used a lot of none-deferred JS and extra CSS, which is not optimized. So, if you have in-house team, tell them to optimize it. If you outsourced it - oh well. What you can use as a reference as well - Google PageSpeed Insights. They even provide "optimized" files (don't blindly trust those).

P.S. And, of course, if you need tech help - you can PM me or email me at dmitrii@regexseo.com

[JMSCC]

This post is deleted!

[DmitriiK]

Well, using GA for this is quite useless. It's very inaccurate. Use right click->inspect element->network tab for those times. Or webpagetest.org.

[JMSCC]

Hi,

I'm using Google Analytics and it was outsourced which probably means it'll cost us for any changes. I have pasted below 3 months of data after the responsive upgrade. Why do you think Average Page Download Time is getting faster?

Avg. Page Load Time |4.26| |5.14| |6.57|

Average Page Download Time |0.53| |0.54| |0.36|

[TimHolmes]

I agree, GA can be a little hit and miss but it at least it has given you some reason to look into it further and see if there is actually something wrong. As per Dmitrii, I would suggest running a series of tests to establish if your site is truly running slower. There could be a multitude of reasons as to why it is running slower so eliminating the issues one by one may help.

Places to test your site include
tools.pingdom.com
gtmetrix.com
Google page speed test
Webpage Test.
Also as per Dmitrii, in browser with developer tools

As it is a new site, are there any new elements that were not included before? new scripts, images etc. Consider also using CDN's to deliver your content for added speed gains. Check the waterfall tables to see if any elements are struggling.

Have you also moved to an SSL when updating redesiging your responsive site, this can also cause a slight reduction in speed.

Hope this helps

Tim