Why Is Outlook.com Slow? Here Are The Reasons

Outlook.com is a popular website in the category. According to the latest CWVIQ speed report, Outlook.com took 0.04 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)

22.13 ms
TCP Connection

(Time taken to establish a connection between your server and the server where Outlook.com is hosted)

7.22 ms
SSL Handshake

(Time taken to verify server credentials by comparing public key with its digital signature)

0.06 ms
Server Processing

(Time it takes for the website’s server to process your request)

7.74 ms
Content Transfer

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

0.05 ms
TOTAL TIME 0.04 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 Outlook.com 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 4.3 s
Server response time 655 ms
First Meaningful Paint – Time for the viewable content to be rendered to the user 2.5 s

How To Make Outlook.com faster

Here are the top 16 ways to make Outlook.com faster.

1. Time to Interactive – 6.09 seconds

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

2. Largest Contentful Paint – 4.78 seconds

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

3. Speed Index – 4.31 seconds

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

4. Minimize main-thread work – 2.67 seconds

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

5. First Contentful Paint – 2.46 seconds

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

6. First Meaningful Paint – 2.46 seconds

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

7. JavaScript execution time – 1.2 seconds

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

8. Eliminate render-blocking resources – 0.79 seconds

Resources are blocking the first paint of your page. Consider delivering critical JS/CSS inline and deferring all non-critical JS/styles.

9. Avoid multiple page redirects – 0.53 seconds

Redirects introduce additional delays before the page can be loaded.

10. Preload Largest Contentful Paint image – 0.38 seconds

If the LCP element is dynamically added to the page, you should preload the image in order to improve LCP.

11. Reduce unused CSS – 0.32 seconds

Reduce unused rules from stylesheets and defer CSS not used for above-the-fold content to decrease bytes consumed by network activity.

12. Properly size images – 0.23 seconds

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

13. Max Potential First Input Delay – 0.07 seconds

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

14. Total Blocking Time – 0.05 seconds

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

15. Remove duplicate modules in JavaScript bundles – 0.05 seconds

16. Defer offscreen images – 0.01 seconds

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

In addition to these reasons, here are other ways to make Outlook.com faster.

Cumulative Layout Shift – 0.083

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

Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy – 80 resources found

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

Avoids enormous network payloads – Total size was 2,137 KiB

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

Avoid an excessive DOM size – 861 elements

A large DOM will increase memory usage, cause longer

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