Page Load Time

[Laureline]

Hi Khoros Community!

I'm Laureline, in charge of Dropbox online community.

We've been having super slow page load time recently (6-7s on average), and we wanted to ask you a few questions that would help us understand where our problem is coming from.

- are you tracking your page load time, and if so what's your average page load time?

- what is your time to first byte?

Thanks a lot!

[JasonHill]

Great question @Laureline, I will be following this discussion with interest.

We are also keen to improve our site performance after getting some feedback from members that we could improve.

Jason 

[Laureline]

Bumping this!

[Kerri]

Not sure if this is wide spread or something we've done, but we've had ppl reporting super slow image load times as well. Is it the whole page for you or just certain aspects? 

[akalinin]

Hi @Laureline 

Our community (communaute.ucpa.com) needs a lot of improvements in performance too and  it's also quite visual. Testing with Lighthouse I get :

First contentful paint : 3,4 sec
First meaningful paint : 5,8 sec

We also are looking to increase speed by rationalizing CSS, however as I understand Lithium converts and stores all images (example when cowriting a blog article) and there are no way to store them elsewhere for example in Cloudinary.

Best,

Anton

https://communaute.ucpa.com/

[Fellsteruk]

Have you tried adding an image which khoros is hosting via it's CDN and then an image hosted somewhere else and see if one loads quicker than the other? 

[Laureline]

Thanks all for your answers!

 @Kerri , it's the whole page for us. We see it for HTML as well as images.

@akalinin (and @Fellsteruk ) hah, we're quite jealous actually! Ours are about x2 yours.

On a more general level we see some improvement when images / CSS / etc. are served from the CDN but even those could be better.

[cblown]

While working with several Khoros customers in the US and Australia we have noticed this more recently too, however its hard to pin-point an exact cause. TTFB times do seem to be higher across the board but we only have data going back 6 months on most instances.

Some of the items we've worked on, in no particular order;

1. Pre-loading assets such as primary font(s).
2. Using the API toolbox to pinpoint high API usage custom components and refactor / improve or even review to remove. 
3. Adjusting JS code so that it loads async and moving things to the end of the document that are not needed prior to content painting.
4. Setup CSS so that text is rendered before the fonts are loaded  font-display
5. Employing app-cache for heavy operations, not to be over-used since it can make things worse if used incorrectly.
6. Caching policies on some CDN loaded assets aren't set correctly.

Some other observations;

• CDN (or browser) blocking when loading >10 assets at once.
• Due to the nature of Community we see high numbers of DOM objects, not typically a problem on desktops but some mobile devices can struggle.

[aniak]

Thank you @Laureline  for sharing! We've been looking into similar issues for the past few months. I'm curious is there any plan / idea to face this issue on #Khoros side? Although there is no (yet?) communication from Google - our SEO team has pointed out that loading time factor is becoming more & more crucial.

CC: @dawidzagorski  @maciejsniezek 

[Laureline]

I'd also be interested to know if there's any plan to work on this on the Khoros Communities side, as - like you're mentioning, loading time will become increasingly important to have a good SEO, especially with changes that Google is planning on introducing.

@cblown - thanks for the recommendations, we did work on 1., 4., and are working on 2., but haven't seen significant results at the moment. We're still going through a list of improvements, and I'll keep this thread updated on our progress 😊

[JuergenM]

Excellent list @cblown! 

@Laureline,  it might be worth working with Khoros PS on this as well. The way even standard components are used, might impact page load time. Analytics capabilities of PS go beyond those in the toolbox and they might find out, what things cause heavy load on servers. We had done everything to optimize and toolbox couldn't help us anymore.

We track page load time as well and have 3 sec. as a benchmark for an average page load. Average numbers and personal observations from users differ every once in a while, though.

Although the community speed is ok in general, we still dream of a good score from Google Pagespeed (-->SEO).

[Laureline]

Cool @JuergenM , that's very interesting.

All the custom components on our community have been designed and developed by Khoros PS team, but still some need optimization, which they are working on at the moment.

That's definitely something we might consider once we've gone through our long list of optimizations 😉

[cblown]

Just adding we saw huge bumps in Lighthouse performance scores right around the end of June (in SpeedCurve). Google updated Lighthouse around this time. So if you are seeing a huge bump in your Lighthouse score it'll be because of that 😉

https://web.dev/lighthouse-whats-new-6.0/#new-metrics: