Updated version of Site-Speed Topography technique for getting broad view of an entire site’s performance from just a handful of key URLs and some readily available metrics. By Harry Roberts.
The idea is that by taking a handful of representative page- or template-types from an entire website, we can quickly build the overall landscape—or topography—of the site by comparing and contrasting numerical and milestone timings. The basic premise is that by taking key metrics from multiple different page types, and analysing the similarities, differences, or variations among them, you can also very quickly realise some very valuable insights about other metrics and optimisations you haven’t even captured.
Similar Time to First Byte (TTFB) across pages suggests that no pages have much more expensive database calls than others; large deltas between TTFB and First Contentful Paint highlight a high proportion of render-blocking resources; gaps between Largest Contentful Paint and SpeedIndex suggest late-loaded content. These insights gained across several representative page types allow us to build a picture of how the entire site might be built, but from observing only a small slice of it.
You will also get a spreradsheet with calculations which will provide info on how pages perform overall across all metrics, which pages exhibit the best or worst scores for a given metric, general stability of a specific metric, are any metrics over budget? And by how much?, we can also set thresholds for those budgets, we can begin to infer other issues from metrics already present. Nice one!
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