Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?
Page load time and response time are key metrics to monitor, and they can give you an in-depth understanding of how your website is performing. However, the difference between page load time and response time isn’t immediately obvious, and neither are the benefits of tracking them independently.
Response Time
Response time refers to the time it takes for an inquiry from a user to receive a response from a server. Response time can be broken down into five parts:
- DNS lookup—This is the time it takes to resolve the hostname to its IP address. If the DNS lookup time is high, this may indicate an issue with the DNS servers.
- Connection time—Referring to the time it takes to connect to the server, these results are generally used to identify network latency. High connection times are often caused by network or routing issues.
- Redirect time—This refers to the time it takes for any necessary HTTP redirects and any extra DNS lookups or connection time during this process.
- First byte— This refers to the time it takes for the first byte of data to transfer. Slow times here can signal issues with server load.
- Last byte—This refers to time it takes to download the final server response. A problem here indicates a bandwidth issue, so you may need to upgrade your bandwidth to increase download speed.
Load Time
Page load time is a different but equally important metric. Load time is a simpler concept referring to the time it takes to download and display an entire individual webpage. This includes all page elements, such as HTML, scripts, CSS, images, and third-party resources.
Here’s a typical request-response process contributing to load time:
- A user enters a URL and the browser makes a request to the server
- The web server processes the request and sends a response back to the browser
- The browser starts receiving page content
- The entire page loads and becomes available to the user to browse
Load time is the elapsed time between a user submitting a URL and the entire page becoming available on the browser for the user to view. Consequently, you will find load times are often much higher than website response times.
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