Page load time is important for SEO. Botify crawls provide valuable insights into page load performance from various perspectives. The example shown here demonstrates how to identify which pages are loading slowly to enable you to optimize these pages.

To see page download time distribution, navigate to the "Load Time Distribution" chart in SiteCrawler's Performance report:

To find if there are areas of the website that tend to be slower or if there are technical reasons for performance disparity, such as HTTP status codes or compression, click on the chart's "Slowest" segment. A URL Explorer report of the slowest-loading pages displays:

To find all pages and their status codes that reply in over one second to include both the Slow and Slowest categories, change the "HTML Load Time" filter to greater than 1,000 and add the "HTTP Status Code" column.

Here is the result:

This report is more impactful when you evaluate whether slow pages include your key content. Add a filter to match your most important templates, such as by page type or match a URL pattern:

If your analytics data is integrated with your Botify project, add the "No. of Visits (All Channels)" column to focus on pages that already generate a little bit of traffic and could generate more if they were faster.

You can export this report to get the list of all pages that reply in more than one second and their status codes.

Looking at the distribution of load time performance for subsets of pages can provide valuable insight into areas of your site that may need optimization.

It makes sense to look at performance for pages that return content (i.e., HTTP 200) instead of redirects and errors. Performance distribution for redirects and errors usually differs significantly from that of HTTP 2XX because returning errors involves different mechanisms in the web server. Error pages and redirects can be fast because they do not return content. Error pages can also be very slow when the server takes a lot of time to conclude that it cannot return the requested content.

Access your performance data by HTTP status code by navigating to the "Load Time Performance by HTTP Status Code" chart in SiteCrawler's Distribution report. Click on the segment corresponding to the data you want, for example, the red section of the HTTP 2XX bar, to get the list of the slowest pages that normally return content (i.e., no redirect 3XX, or error 4XX/5XX).

There may by significant differences by subdomain, which often separate different types of content. Access your performance data by subdomain by navigating to the "Average Load Time by Domain/Subdomain" chart in SiteCrawler's Distribution report. This chart shows the average load time performance by page language from the HTML lang tag (blue line) and the volume of pages for each subdomain (bars). Note that average performance may not have significance for extremely low volumes. Click on any subdomain bar to see load times for all pages in the subdomain in a URL Explorer report.

For multilingual websites, load time performance may vary by language. Access your performance data by language by navigating to the "Average Load Time by Language" chart in SiteCrawler's Distribution report.

Access your performance data by page compression status by navigating to the "Average Load Time Gzip vs. Non Gzip" chart in SiteCrawler's Distribution report. Since the results are sometimes surprising, with non-compressed pages being the fastest to load, it is useful to evaluate with status codes. Click on the bar for non-compressed pages to see these pages in a URL Explorer report, and add the "HTTP Status Codes" column to see if there is a correlation between load speed and status codes.

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