Mobile speed test

Hi,

Until now, I used GTmetrix or Pingdom.

They give a clear speed “Largest Contentful Paint” but do not provide 4G mobile testing for free. Someone recommended webpagetest so I am testing over here.

However, how/where can I see the load time on 4g mobile?
Webpagetest seems mostly concerned about the First Time Bite.

Is that the same as the moment that the first content is shown to a visitor?

Here is a screenshot of the outcome: https://www.screencast.com/t/12Imb3S2BI

Does this say that the first time a visitor, using 4G connection on mobile, sees the content is after 0.800 seconds?

Thing is, when I test this same site on Think with Google it keeps saying it loads in 3.3 seconds, no matter what I do.

However, the desktop version did improve a lot after my optimizations and loads now in 1 second using GTmetrix. But think with Google keeps giving me a 3.3 each time I test the same site.

Hope someone is willing to shed some light on this and help me understand how I need to read Webpagetest?

Thanks!

Congratulations on the improvements you have already made to the speed of the desktop site!

Looking at the WebPageTest report you shared, the Web Vitals section of report is going to be the closest match to what you see in Think With Google.

Regarding your question about Time to First Byte, that metric is often used to help understand how long the initial HTML page takes to process on the server and start arriving at the users browser. It looks like the Time to First Byte for this site is around 800ms. There is room for improvement (a good target is usually below 200ms,) but for this site there may be other items to address first that would likely take less effort to address than optimizing the WordPress server.

While I can’t see the full Think With Google report for this site, Think With Google uses Lighthouse to gather data. Lighthouse uses both network throttling and CPU throttling to approximate a lower-end device and connection. Looking at a Lighthouse report for the site in Chrome DevTools, it looks like there are some opportunities to significantly reduce the size of the CSS and JavaScript files that are loaded early on in the page load. JavaScript and CSS can affect speed both in the time it takes to download as well as the time it takes to parse and process. Also, consider reviewing the size of the images and when they are loaded. Currently, it looks like some of the images that are below the mobile viewport are loading before the main image which will delay the Largest Contentful Paint. There is a convenient link to an Image Analysis report in WebPageTest that can help identify image optimizations.

Looking at the waterfall for the site, bandwidth is completely utilized for over 1 second in the time before the large images load in the viewport and that there is also significant JavaScript processing time:

Here is a link to a WebPageTest screen where that screenshot was captured:

Lighthouse has specific recommendations that should be helpful in deciding where to focus your efforts. Here is a screenshot of the recommendations for this site:

I would recommend running both Lighthouse and WebPageTest. Lighthouse provides a prescription of what to do, and WebPageTest gives lots of helpful reports and detail.

When running WebPageTest, consider selecting the “Emulate Mobile Browser” and select Motorola G (gen4) which matches what is used in Lighthouse.

Over time, if you find that you cannot get similar device emulation with your current service providers, you may also consider a performance monitoring service that specifically supports mobile emulation.

Good luck with your optimizations!

Hi rtanzola,

Thanks a lot for your outstanding help.
I now understand it better!

Have a great day,
Annie

Watch this excellent video and you will be able to easily find and fix the issue yourself. “Optimize for Core Web Vitals” Optimize for Core Web Vitals - YouTube

@Webnauts,

Thanks, I will take a look at it!