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How to Read the Grade and Summary Sections on GTmetrix
How to Read the Grade and Summary Sections on GTmetrix

Understanding Grade and Summary sections inside the report about your website

Updated over a week ago

The Grade and Summary sections of GTmetrix provide you with the following:

Grade

The Grade section indicates your website's overall rating based on both its loading speed and how well your website is built for optimal performance. Aim for an A or B rating:

The GTmetrix grade

If your grade is C or lower, you can improve it by fixing the top issues listed in the rest of the GTmetrix sections. Please note that:

  • If your website loads fast, it doesn’t automatically mean it is optimized. You can make it even faster and, therefore, 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, so make sure to check them all. However, optimization is still required for fast website loading

How to Read the Summary Section

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

The speed visualization of a sample webiste at GTmetrix

What Is TTFB?

In the speed visualization, you will find a first point labeled TTFB. It is the Time To First Byte (TTFB) - the sum of the time the server takes to respond to requests, the Redirect Duration, the Connection Duration, and the Backend Duration. This process depends on multiple factors such as network transfer speeds, latency, efficiency of the application code, and performance of the server.

Here are some reference values for TTFB, in milliseconds:

TTFB

Rating

<100ms

Perfect

100ms-300ms

Great

300ms-500ms

Acceptable

>500ms

Poor

How to Reduce TTFB

Top Issues

Scrolling down past the Summary, you will find the top issues, which can also be consulted in the Performance tab.

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

Page Details

The last part of this section shows the fully loaded page time along with Total Page Size:

The Page Details on the GTmetrix Summary section

The recommendation is for your website to load in 2 seconds or less (2000ms). For total page size, the smaller, the better, although a size under 2MB is suggested.

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