Thesaurus.Com is a popular website in the Reference/Thesauri category. According to the latest CWVIQ speed report, Thesaurus.Com took 2.49 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) |
2213.7 ms |
TCP Connection
(Time taken to establish a connection between your server and the server where Thesaurus.Com is hosted) |
128.6 ms |
SSL Handshake
(Time taken to verify server credentials by comparing public key with its digital signature) |
2.7 ms |
Server Processing
(Time it takes for the website’s server to process your request) |
142.1 ms |
Content Transfer
(Time it takes for the requested data to be transmitted to your server) |
4.3 ms |
TOTAL TIME |
2.49 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 Thesaurus.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 |
4.4 s |
Server response time |
2 ms |
First Meaningful Paint – Time for the viewable content to be rendered to the user |
0.7 s |
How To Make Thesaurus.Com faster
Here are the top 16 ways to make Thesaurus.Com faster.
1. Minimize main-thread work – 13.27 seconds
Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.
2. Time to Interactive – 12.93 seconds
Time to Interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
3. Largest Contentful Paint – 7.2 seconds
Largest Contentful Paint marks the time at which the largest text or image is painted.
4. Reduce JavaScript execution time – 6.3 seconds
Consider reducing the time spent parsing, compiling, and executing JS. You may find delivering smaller JS payloads helps with this.
5. Speed Index – 4.41 seconds
Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
6. Reduce unused JavaScript – 2.42 seconds
Reduce unused JavaScript and defer loading scripts until they are required to decrease bytes consumed by network activity.
7. Total Blocking Time – 1.54 seconds
Sum of all time periods between FCP and Time to Interactive, when task length exceeded 50ms, expressed in milliseconds.
8. Properly size images – 0.67 seconds
Serve images that are appropriately-sized to save cellular data and improve load time.
9. First Meaningful Paint – 0.66 seconds
First Meaningful Paint measures when the primary content of a page is visible.
10. First Contentful Paint – 0.66 seconds
First Contentful Paint marks the time at which the first text or image is painted.
11. Serve images in next-gen formats – 0.61 seconds
Image formats like WebP and AVIF often provide better compression than PNG or JPEG, which means faster downloads and less data consumption.
12. Max Potential First Input Delay – 0.4 seconds
The maximum potential First Input Delay that your users could experience is the duration of the longest task.
13. Defer offscreen images – 0.38 seconds
Consider lazy-loading offscreen and hidden images after all critical resources have finished loading to lower time to interactive.
14. Efficiently encode images – 0.12 seconds
Optimized images load faster and consume less cellular data.
15. Minify JavaScript – 0.09 seconds
Minifying JavaScript files can reduce payload sizes and script parse time.
16. Enable text compression – 0.04 seconds
Text-based resources should be served with compression (gzip, deflate or brotli) to minimize total network bytes.
In addition to these reasons, here are other ways to make Thesaurus.Com faster.
Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy – 197 resources found
A long cache lifetime can speed up repeat visits to your page.
Cumulative Layout Shift – 0.093
Cumulative Layout Shift measures the movement of visible elements within the viewport.
Avoid an excessive DOM size – 874 elements
A large DOM will increase memory usage, cause longer
Avoid enormous network payloads – Total size was 5,317 KiB
Large network payloads cost users real money and are highly correlated with long load times.
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.