Page Load Speed
The time between a request and a page that is loaded and usable.
Analogy Mental model
How long the kitchen takes. Three minutes with no food and the customer leaves, and writes about it afterwards.
In practice What you actually do
Use PageSpeed Insights for field data and GTmetrix for the waterfall. The usual wins, in order: compress images and serve them in a modern format, enable caching, put a CDN in front, cut redirect chains, and check server response time before touching anything else.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
A desktop test on office wifi is not the measurement that matters. Most traffic is on a phone, often on a slow connection, and a page taking more than three seconds loses a large share of those visitors before it renders.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →