Digital.nhs.uk is a popular website in the category. According to the latest CWVIQ speed report, Digital.nhs.uk took 0.18 seconds to load the page. Anything over 5 seconds means that the website is too slow to load.
A slow load time could be due to a lot of things – poor network connectivity at your end, an unreliable hosting server, or a poorly optimized webpage.
First off, let’s look at a breakup of the loading time.
| DNS Lookup Time
(Time taken to lookup the IP address of the server) |
29.01 ms |
| TCP Connection
(Time taken to establish a connection between your server and the server where Digital.nhs.uk is hosted) |
74.72 ms |
| SSL Handshake
(Time taken to verify server credentials by comparing public key with its digital signature) |
0.04 ms |
| Server Processing
(Time it takes for the website’s server to process your request) |
74.4 ms |
| Content Transfer
(Time it takes for the requested data to be transmitted to your server) |
0.07 ms |
| TOTAL TIME |
0.18 seconds |
A high value for DNS lookup or TCP connection could be because of local settings, or internet connection.While a high server processing time or content transfer time could indicate issues with the website or its server.
We also studied the Digital.nhs.uk Lighthouse report to look at the site’s performance. Here is what we found.
| Speed Index – Time for the page content to be visibly populated |
1.5 s |
| Server response time |
181 ms |
| First Meaningful Paint – Time for the viewable content to be rendered to the user |
1.2 s |
How To Make Digital.nhs.uk faster
Here are the top 15 ways to make Digital.nhs.uk faster.
1. Properly size images – 2.8 seconds
Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.
2. Serve images in next-gen formats – 2.65 seconds
Image formats like WebP and AVIF often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.
3. Largest Contentful Paint – 1.84 seconds
Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted.
4. Time to Interactive – 1.76 seconds
Time to Interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
5. Efficiently encode images – 1.75 seconds
Optimized images load faster and consume less cellular data.
6. Speed Index – 1.51 seconds
Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
7. First Meaningful Paint – 1.18 seconds
First Meaningful Paint measures when the primary content of a page is visible.
8. First Contentful Paint – 1 seconds
First Contentful Paint marks the time at which the first text or image is painted.
9. Minimizes main-thread work – 0.64 seconds
Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.
10. Eliminate render-blocking resources – 0.33 seconds
Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.
11. JavaScript execution time – 0.24 seconds
Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling, and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.
12. Avoid multiple page redirects – 0.23 seconds
Redirects introduce additional delays before the page can be loaded.
13. Reduce unused JavaScript – 0.15 seconds
Reduce unused JavaScript and defer loading scripts until they are required to decrease bytes consumed by network activity.
14. Max Potential First Input Delay – 0.11 seconds
The maximum potential First Input Delay that your users could experience is the duration of the longest task.
15. Total Blocking Time – 0.06 seconds
Sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds.
In addition to these reasons, here are other ways to make Digital.nhs.uk faster.
Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy – 27 resources found
A long cache lifetime can speed up repeat visits to your page.
Avoid enormous network payloads – Total size was 4,591 KiB
Large network payloads cost users real money and are highly correlated with long load times.
Cumulative Layout Shift – 0.248
Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport.
Avoid an excessive DOM size – 1,569 elements
A large DOM will increase memory usage, cause longer
Preconnect to required origins –
Consider adding `preconnect` or `dns-prefetch` resource hints to establish early connections to important third-party origins.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of CWVIQ, and has been in the internet media space for over 15 years. He has previously served as the AVP of Products and Head of Business at popular media portals. He has worked with several SaaS and enterprise businesses as an external consultant for their SEO marketing campaigns.
