GTmetrix Grade

GTmetrix Grade indicates the overall rating for the tested website, including both how fast it loads and how well it’s built. Aim for A or B rating:

Improving your grade can be done by eliminating the top issues listed in the sections below. It’s important to note that:

If your website loads fast, it doesn’t automatically mean it is optimized. You can make it even faster (and so - more SEO attractive) with optimization
If your website is optimized, it doesn’t automatically mean it will load fast. There are other issues that can affect the website’s performance, make sure to check them all. However, optimization is still a must if you want your website to load fast

How to read the Summary section of GTmetrix?

Right below the grade, you will see Speed Visualization. This section indicates information about all the loaded elements, and how soon the visitors are able to interact with your website:

What is TTFB?

It’s worth noting that one of the most important metrics for the website is TTFB, it can be classified into these categories:

TTFB	Rating
<100ms	Perfect
100ms-300ms	Great
300ms-500ms	Acceptable
>500ms	Poor

TTFB (Time To First Byte) is not only how soon the server responds to requests, but a sum of Redirect Duration + Connection Duration + Backend Duration. This entire process depends on multiple factors such as network transfer speeds, latency, efficiency of the application code, and performance of the server.

How to reduce TTFB?

Optimizing your website (following recommendations from GTmetrix)
Finding a more optimized theme
Carefully selecting an optimization plugin (for example, for WordPress we recommend WP-Optimize)
Upgrading your hosting plan if you are reaching the limitations of your current plan

Top issues

Another important piece of information is Top Issues, which can be found in the middle of the page:

Always prioritize High and Medium issues as they will increase the website’s performance the most!

You will see a detailed list of issues in the Performance tab.

Page Details

The last important information in this section is fully loaded page time along with Total Page Size, it can be found on the bottom of the page:

Google recommends loading time being under 2000ms (2 seconds). As for Total Page Size – the smaller the better, although having it under 2MB is recommended.

NOTES: