Why Is Guardian.co.uk Slow? Here Are The Reasons

Guardian.co.uk is a popular website in the category. According to the latest CWVIQ speed report, Guardian.co.uk took 0.03 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)

17.78 ms
TCP Connection

(Time taken to establish a connection between your server and the server where Guardian.co.uk is hosted)

1.85 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)

6.53 ms
Content Transfer

(Time it takes for the requested data to be transmitted to your server)

0.04 ms
TOTAL TIME 0.03 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 Guardian.co.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 2.9 s
Server response time 15 ms
First Meaningful Paint – Time for the viewable content to be rendered to the user 1.2 s

How To Make Guardian.co.uk faster

Here are the top 17 ways to make Guardian.co.uk faster.

1. Time to Interactive – 7.44 seconds

Time to Interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.

2. Minimize main-thread work – 5.33 seconds

Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.

3. Speed Index – 2.9 seconds

Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.

4. Reduce JavaScript execution time – 2.78 seconds

Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling, and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.

5. Reduce unused JavaScript – 1.75 seconds

Reduce unused JavaScript and defer loading scripts until they are required to decrease bytes consumed by network activity.

6. Largest Contentful Paint – 1.63 seconds

Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted.

7. First Contentful Paint – 1.16 seconds

First Contentful Paint marks the time at which the first text or image is painted.

8. First Meaningful Paint – 1.16 seconds

First Meaningful Paint measures when the primary content of a page is visible.

9. Enable text compression – 0.64 seconds

Text-based resources should be served with compression (gzip, deflate or brotli) to minimize total network bytes.

10. Avoid multiple page redirects – 0.55 seconds

Redirects introduce additional delays before the page can be loaded.

11. Defer offscreen images – 0.49 seconds

Consider lazy-loading offscreen and hidden images after all critical resources have finished loading to lower time to interactive.

12. Properly size images – 0.38 seconds

Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.

13. Serve images in next-gen formats – 0.28 seconds

Image formats like WebP and AVIF often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.

14. Total Blocking Time – 0.27 seconds

Sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds.

15. Max Potential First Input Delay – 0.14 seconds

The maximum potential First Input Delay that your users could experience is the duration of the longest task.

16. Remove duplicate modules in JavaScript bundles – 0.1 seconds

17. Avoid serving legacy JavaScript to modern browsers – 0.01 seconds

Polyfills and transforms enable legacy browsers to use new JavaScript features. However, many aren’t necessary for modern browsers. For your bundled JavaScript, adopt a modern script deployment strategy using module/nomodule feature detection to reduce the amount of code shipped to modern browsers, while retaining support for legacy browsers.

In addition to these reasons, here are other ways to make Guardian.co.uk faster.

Avoid an excessive DOM size – 4,756 elements

A large DOM will increase memory usage, cause longer

Avoid enormous network payloads – Total size was 4,058 KiB

Large network payloads cost users real money and are highly correlated with long load times.

Cumulative Layout Shift – 0.301

Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport.

Preconnect to required origins –

Consider adding `preconnect` or `dns-prefetch` resource hints to establish early connections to important third-party origins.

Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy – 54 resources found

A long cache lifetime can speed up repeat visits to your page.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top