Page load time
Page load time, in video analytics, is how long the web page holding the player took to finish loading. It matters because a viewer cannot press play until the page is ready, so a slow page shows up as a slow video even when the stream is fast.
Why it matters
Viewers cannot watch until the page is ready, so a slow page looks like a slow video. On ecommerce and news pages, slow loading also costs sales and readers before any video plays. Measuring it next to video metrics shows which team needs to fix the delay.
How it works
- The browser records when navigation to the page begins.
- It loads the HTML, scripts, images and other resources the page needs.
- The browser fires a load event when the page and its resources have finished loading.
- The time from navigation start to that load event is the page load time.
What is a good page load time?
A good page load time is under about 3 seconds on mobile, and faster is better. Google research found that more than half of mobile visitors leave when a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. For video pages, the page should be ready quickly enough that the player can start right away.
Does page load time affect video startup?
Yes, page load time affects how soon a video can start, because the player usually cannot load until the page does. A viewer feels the total wait, not separate parts. That is why analytics often report total startup time: page load time plus player initialization time plus video startup time.
Where it's used
Ecommerce brands and news publishers track page load time next to video startup time to work out whether a slow start is the page's fault or the video's.
Where it usually goes wrong, and how FastPix handles it
Video teams often look only at stream metrics, so a slow page caused by heavy scripts or images is misread as a CDN or encoding problem.
Page load time is measured for each view in FastPix Video Data, from navigation start to the page's load event, and is added to player initialization and video startup time to give total startup time. That tells you whether the web team or the video team owns a slow start, so the right fix ships first.
By the numbers
- Google research published in 2016 found that 53 percent of mobile website visitors leave if a page does not load within three seconds. (Google: 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3 seconds to load (Marketing Dive))
- The W3C Navigation Timing specification defines loadEventEnd as the time after the browser completes handling the load event for the document. (Navigation Timing Level 2 (W3C))
