Every time you visit a website your browser sends a request to a server. The response time shows how fast the computer that you connected with can handle this request.
Response time is influenced by several factors.
Among other things, the distance between the devices, the bandwidth, the server's technical specifications, settings and load will equally affect the speed of the answer.
If a server has to handle a smaller number of requests besides yours, and your PC is closer to it, it will answer faster.
The response time is also influenced by the quality of a website's source code and the complexity of the question. It's easier to answer a simple question than one which is needlessly overcomplicated.
The countless variables make it difficult to define what qualifies as a good server response time.
WebyMon informs you about your server’s response time based on the time it takes for our servers to download the HTML files from your website.
Ideally, if your website's HTML files are not unusually large, your server's response time should be lower than 400 ms.
If for some reason, you cannot reach this value you should at least aim for a faster response time than what your competitors have. As you can also monitor competitor sites with our app, you can easily find out exactly how low this value should be.
You can find three metrics in our reports in connection with server response time.
Avg. response time shows how much time it took for our servers to download the files from a monitored server during the selected period on average.
While Min. and Max. response time informs you about the shortest and the longest download time in the selected period.
Besides HTML files, the browsers may use several other file types, like CSS, JS or JPEG files in order to display the contents of a website.
We don’t measure the download speed of these additional elements, therefore in some cases it could take longer for a web page to completely download to your visitors’ devices, than the response time values our reports inform you about.
You can find additional information about server response time and other factors that could influence your website's speed in this post.