Performance Metrics

The Performance Metrics feature in SiteOne Crawler provides detailed analysis of your website’s loading performance, identifying both the fastest and slowest pages to help you prioritize optimization efforts.

Key Capabilities

SiteOne Crawler analyzes performance from multiple angles:

1. Fastest Pages: Identifies your best-performing pages as benchmarks
2. Slowest Pages: Pinpoints problematic pages that need optimization
3. Response Time Analysis: Detailed timing metrics for each URL
4. Content Size Correlation: Relationship between page size and loading time
5. Resource Type Performance: Performance breakdown by content type

Fastest Pages Analysis

The analyzer identifies exceptionally fast-loading pages on your site:

URL                            | Response time | Size     | Content type
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
/api/status                    | 12 ms         | 1.2 kB   | JSON
/robots.txt                    | 15 ms         | 348 B    | Text
/assets/logo.svg               | 18 ms         | 4.5 kB   | SVG
/about                         | 45 ms         | 28 kB    | HTML
/products                      | 52 ms         | 42 kB    | HTML

Slowest Pages Analysis

More importantly, the analyzer identifies pages with slow response times:

URL                            | Response time | Size     | Content type | Potential issue
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/high-resolution-gallery       | 3.2 s         | 8.5 MB   | HTML         | Large images
/search?q=complex+query        | 2.8 s         | 156 kB   | HTML         | Database query
/legacy-catalog                | 1.9 s         | 3.2 MB   | HTML         | Unoptimized scripts
/contact                       | 1.7 s         | 250 kB   | HTML         | Third-party forms
/blog/article-with-video       | 1.5 s         | 4.1 MB   | HTML         | Large video embed

Customizable Performance Thresholds

You can customize the performance analysis with these options:

• --fastest-urls-top-limit: Set how many fastest URLs to show (default: 20)
• --fastest-urls-max-time: Maximum response time to qualify as “fast” (default: 1 second)
• --slowest-urls-top-limit: Set how many slowest URLs to show (default: 20)
• --slowest-urls-min-time: Minimum response time to qualify for analysis (default: 0.01 seconds)
• --slowest-urls-max-time: Time threshold for critical performance issues (default: 3 seconds)

Implementation Details

The performance analyzers work by:

1. Tracking response times for all crawled URLs
2. Filtering results based on content type (typically focusing on HTML pages)
3. Sorting URLs by response time (ascending for fastest, descending for slowest)
4. Applying thresholds to focus on meaningful results
5. Presenting the results in clearly formatted tables

Practical Applications

The Performance Metrics feature is valuable for several scenarios:

Performance Optimization

• Identify specific pages that need optimization
• Establish performance benchmarks from your fastest pages
• Prioritize optimization efforts based on loading time

User Experience Improvement

• Focus on optimizing the slowest user-facing pages
• Ensure critical conversion paths have optimal performance
• Identify pages that may cause user abandonment due to slow loading

Technical Troubleshooting

• Detect performance anomalies across your site
• Identify patterns in slow-loading resources
• Diagnose server-side or client-side performance bottlenecks

Content Strategy

• Understand the performance impact of different content types
• Identify content that may need optimization or restructuring
• Make data-driven decisions about content complexity

Complementary Analysis

For more comprehensive performance insights, combine this feature with:

• Content Type Analysis to examine resource distribution
• Technical Analysis for server configuration insights
• Best Practices Analysis to identify optimization opportunities

💡Further Development Ideas

Future enhancements to the Performance Metrics feature could include:

• Correlation analysis between page complexity and loading time
• Performance trends for different sections of your website
• Comparative benchmarking against industry standards
• Time-to-first-byte (TTFB) specific analysis
• Resource waterfall visualization for slow pages
• Performance score calculation based on multiple factors