I am learning how to read and understand the Waterfall view. The Fully Loaded time is very high and I am not sure which requests are the cause.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110824_RK_b4236c0ec08c77244b02eccc7ec9e8f1/
How do I decipher?
Thanks.
Hi!
First thing that I would do is to customize the waterfall (link below the waterfall) and limit it to a duration of 10 seconds. This gives you a much better overview, what is happening during the crucial period of loading.
What you can see there (or what I see there), is that your page has at the beginning of the waterfall pretty big files to fetch (HTML, CSS, JS), identified by the long blue lines. A closer look at the HTTP Headers (Click on each item in the waterfall), shows, that all of these files are not gzipped. That is a big one. And an easy one. GZIP all your HTML, JS and CSS.
Additionally a click on these files, looking at the source code, shows tons of whitespace. So a good idea would be to first minify these assets, and then gzip them.
Also a good idea is to either cocatenate the different CSS files and JS files, or think about inlining them. There is a trade-off regarding Cacheability and Re-use of different Code components that is site specific.
Another thing is, later on in the waterfall, that you see again big blue lines. A click on them reveals, that they are JPGs. Just as an example I picked the Pizza Picture, loaded it into irfanview, clicked on save for web, and got as a result a JPG with the size of 11 KByte, instead of your current 57 KByte. Without much quality loss. So you should play around with the bigger images a little bit and try to get a good compromise between Size and Quality.
That’s it from my end after a first view at your Waterfall. I am sure there is more that can be done, but might be little bit more work.
Kind regards,
Markus
The fully loaded time specifically is being artificially extended because of what looks like ad tracking information from eyewonder firing periodically. You can force WebPagetest to stop the measurement at onLoad (Document Complete) in the advanced settings which will ignore those requests (though if you work with eyewonder directly you should yell at them about the constant tracking beacons firing).
As Markus mentioned, there are a lot of improvements that can be made to the actual site content itself, particularly around text and image compression: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110824_RK_b4236c0ec08c77244b02eccc7ec9e8f1/2/performance_optimization/#compress_text
You can save around 422 KB by enabling gzip and 383 KB by better compressing your jpeg images (just those two changes will reduce the page size by half).
-Pat