Source Domains Analysis

The Source Domains Analysis feature examines how your website’s resources are distributed across different domains, providing valuable insights into domain dependencies, content distribution, and potential optimization opportunities.

Key Features

The Source Domains Analyzer offers:

1. Domain Distribution: Overview of all domains serving content for your website
2. Content Type Breakdown: Analysis of what types of content each domain provides
3. Performance Metrics: Size and load time statistics for each domain
4. Third-party Dependencies: Identification of external domain dependencies
5. CDN Usage: Recognition of content delivery networks and their contribution

Analysis Table

The analyzer generates a comprehensive table showing how resources are distributed across domains:

Domain             | Totals           | HTML          | Image         | JS            | CSS           | Document      | JSON
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
example.com        | 67/30MB/6.2s     | 48/12MB/4s    | 11/18MB/2s    | 4/13kB/54ms   | 2/77kB/41ms   | 1/135B/10ms   | 1/36B/14ms
cdn.example.com    | 28/5MB/780ms     | 0/0B/0ms      | 20/4.5MB/750ms| 6/420kB/25ms  | 2/95kB/5ms    | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms
fonts.example.net  | 8/250kB/120ms    | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms      | 8/250kB/120ms | 0/0B/0ms
analytics.xyz.com  | 2/45kB/80ms      | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms      | 2/45kB/80ms   | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms      | 0/0B/0ms

In this table:

• Totals: Shows the total number of resources, their combined size, and cumulative load time from each domain
• Content Type Columns: Break down the resources by type (HTML, images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.)
• Metrics Format: Each cell contains three metrics: count/size/load-time

Practical Applications

The Source Domains Analysis provides several practical insights:

Performance Optimization

• Identify domains contributing the most to page load time
• Determine if CDN usage is effective or needs adjustment
• Find opportunities to consolidate resources on fewer domains

Security Assessment

• Discover all third-party domains your site depends on
• Identify unexpected or potentially malicious domains
• Evaluate the security implications of external dependencies

Infrastructure Planning

• Understand your content distribution architecture
• Plan migrations or CDN strategy changes
• Evaluate the impact of domain changes

Compliance and Privacy

• Identify third-party domains that may have privacy implications
• Ensure all domain dependencies comply with your privacy policies
• Discover unexpected data sharing with external domains

Implementation Details

The Source Domains Analyzer works by:

1. Tracking every resource URL encountered during the crawl
2. Extracting the domain from each URL
3. Categorizing resources by content type
4. Calculating size and load time metrics for each domain/content type combination
5. Aggregating the data into a comprehensive table

Best Practices Based on Analysis

The analysis can help identify several best practices to implement:

• Domain Sharding: For HTTP/1.1 sites, consider using 2-4 domains for parallel downloads
• Domain Consolidation: For HTTP/2 sites, consider consolidating resources on fewer domains
• CDN Optimization: Ensure static assets are served from CDNs for optimal performance
• Third-party Reduction: Minimize dependencies on third-party domains where possible
• Resource Prioritization: Prioritize critical resources on fast-responding domains

💡Further Development Ideas

Future enhancements to the Source Domains Analysis could include:

• Geographical analysis of domain server locations
• Domain health metrics (reliability, average response time)
• Historical comparison of domain dependency changes
• Security and privacy risk scores for third-party domains
• Recommendations for domain consolidation or sharding based on protocol
• Integration with domain reputation databases