Hi,
Our website is built on top of WordPress. I’ve experienced really slow load times and our developer has said it’s due to the ad units. I’d like to get some benchmarks in place so that a) we have objective insight into what’s causing the problem, and b) once we make changes we’ll know whether it’s had any affect.
We use Revive to serve ads and he’s going to migrate the IAB standard ad units to be served asynchronously. Here’s how the homepage currently performs: [url=http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150608_45_10C7/1/details/]http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150608_45_10C7/1/details/[/url]. If anything jumps out at you feel free to pass any suggestions along.
I plan to look at these metrics in a Pre/Post analysis: First Bye, Start Render, Visually Complete, Load Time, # DOM Elements, Speed Index.
What I’m really interested in is the “perceived page load” – so I think moving to asynch ads will help with that. Of the above metrics I plan to capture programatically through the API, which corresponds most closely to a “perceived page load”? Would that be Start Render or Visually Complete? With the test results above, that would either be 2.9sec or 8.6sec – which is quite a big difference!
Any help is much appreciated!