With innumerable tools and applications available it can get quite confusing for the users to be able to choose, just one. There are times when we are faced by several questions such as what are their features? What do they do? and what are its applications? Today we are going to take a look at gtmetrix which is one of the most popular speed test tools. So what are the features, uses and applications of gtmetrix? Let us take a look:

What is Gtmetrix?

Gtmetrix is a web-based tool that functions to analyze the speed of the website. It does this, by analyzing the load-time, size and the requests occurring, in order to generate the score that has recommendations to enhance it. The gtmetrix can be used by the SEO pros, site owners, and various other people to measure the performance of the site.

How does gtmetrix Work?

Now let us take a look at how the gtmetrix functions:

1. To start with, a user does not require an account to begin. However you would require one incase you wish to edit the browser type and the location.
2. Next plugin the URL into your website inorder to use the gtmetrix.
3. Once the report has been completed, the user can review the metrics offered.
4. Here the user will receive an overview that includes: the gtmetrix grade, web vitals and also a summary. This shows the speed visualizations.
5. Speed visualization is a wonderful way in which you can take a look at what your website looks like, as it starts to load. It is also layered with metrics overlayed.
6. Located at the very bottom are displayed the top problems that are recognised and broken out by total topics: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), Total Blocking Time (TBT), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Now you will also be able to check the level of impact that assists in prioritization.

It is recommended by GtMetrix to focus on the special audits that are included within the Structured tab, despite the fact that these are first available once you run the tests.

The Different Performance Tabs within Gtmetrix

Here is a look at some of the main features within the Gtmetrix:

1. The Performance tab: This tab helps by offering an insight into the different performance-oriented metrics such as: Speed Index,FCP, CLS, and other metrics that are browser-centric.

2. The Structure Tab: [/b]This feature is meant to offer you suggestions on when to begin. It does this by outlining the various audits of the tool and the effect that each item has. The information offered includes the details about the audits, what they display and what requires to be rectified. This tab is quite important as it showcases the level of experience needed to apply the optimisations.

[b]3. The Waterfall Tab: This displays the waterfall chart along with the details about every activity within the waterfall approach. Here you can take a look at those resources that usually take a longer time to load.

4. The Video Tab: This tab comprises the feature to record the video of the loading process of a page and is used to specifically focus on a certain problem within the page. This tab can only be accessed if the user has an account.

5. The History Tab: This allows the user to view the graphs that show the changes with time to the page metrics such as: the size of the page, the interacting time, and the scores.

What the Measurements Mean


Here is an overview of the overall scores of the output:

The Gtmetrix Grade: This grade allows the user to better understand the overall performance of the website. It is determined by taking into account the load time of the user, and the overall architectural design of the website.

The Performance Score: [/b]as stated within the gtmetrix website, this can be compared to the Lighthouse performance score.

[b]The Structure: This rating is a combination of Gtmetrix propriety assessment of the custom audits and also the assessment done by Lighthouse. The score showcases how the site has been designed for performance.

The Web Vitals: This category aims at the metrics used by Google to understand if the website has been able to generate the ‘delightful experience’.

The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This is all about the time taken for the most important element of the website page to load, so that the user can ‘view’ it.Here a good score would be 1.2 seconds or even less.

The Total Blocking Time or TBT: This is a Lighthouse metric that has been created to measure the load responsiveness of the website for the input of the user.This is the delay in time that prevents the user from interacting.

CONCLUSION
That is all that we have on How to Use the gtmetrix. Be sure to share your feedback with us and tell us how we did .
Source - https://rabbitloader.com/articles/gtmetrix/

In order to determine a website’s PageSpeed performance, Google developed a set of performance metrics, Time to Interactive (TTI) is among them.

Have you ever tried to click on an element of a website during the initial page loading time? it doesn’t work, right? It takes some time to become responsive. This time span is known as Time to Interactive (TTI).

In this guide, we will discuss every detail of Time To Interactive (TTI), which includes what TTI is and how to measure it. Also, we will explain the difference between TTI and TBT. Finally, we will wrap up by exploring the three easiest ways to improve TTI.

What is Time to Interactive (TTI)?

In simple words, Google added the Time to Interactive (TTI) to measure the time between when a page starts to load and the time when the page becomes fully responsive to the user input. The Time to Interactive can be measured by calculating the difference between the First Contentful Paint time (FCP) and the time when a user can interact with the website’s element.

Google sets a few criteria in order to consider a web page fully loading.

Any meaningful content of the website is rendered on the browser. It’s also known as First Contentful Paint (FCP).
The browser can handle any user event.
The page will respond within 50 seconds.

How to measure TTI?

Note: In Google PageSpeed Insights, you can’t measure the Time to Interactive performance.

In order to measure the TTI performance, you can use an online PageSpeed monitoring tool like GTmetrix. You just need to enter the website’s URL and click on the Analyze button. If you want a customized PageSpeed performance test, you can change the test location, network, and browser type.

Once the GTmetrix scans your website, you can see a report. In order to see the Time to Interactive performance, you need to click on the performance tab.

Apart from the GTmetrix, you can also measure your website’s TTI performance in the WebPageTest.org tool.

What is a Good TTI score?

1. For a user’s better understanding, Google also categorizes the performance of each Core Web Vitals metric. Thus, like FCP, LCP, and CLS, Google also sets some boundary values to the Time to Interactive.

2. A TTI score of less than 3.8 seconds is considered a good performance, and no improvement is needed to improve the user experience.

3. If the TTI score varies between 3.8 seconds to 7.3 seconds, its considered as an average TTI performance. In order to enhance the user experience, you need to optimize the TTI performance.

When the TTI value exceeds 7.3 seconds, it’s categorized as a poor TTI performance.

The difference between TTI and TBT

At this point, you can understand the TTI. Most website owners or SEO experts often get confused between TTI and TBT, as both are used to measure a website’s interactivity. Let’s concentrate on the difference between Time to Interactive (TTI) and Total Blocking Time (TBT).

Time to Interactive (TTI) calculates the time to become a website fully responsive to user’s input. On the other hand, the Total Blocking Time (TBT) measures the span of time a website is unresponsive to a user’s input during loading an event.

Combining these two performance metrics, TTI and TBT, provides you with a clear picture of how a website responds to a user’s input. However, compared to the Total Blocking Time, TTI is a more user-centric metric.

The 3 easiest ways to improve TTI

Providing a seamless user experience is paramount to improving the conversion rate. Ignoring the TTI performance can hamper your website’s user experience which leads to a loss in business.

Let’s explore the three easiest ways to optimize TTI performance which includes:

1. Minimize the main thread works
2. Optimize the CSS file
3. Defer the JavaScript file

Minimize the main thread works

During the PageSpeed analysis in Google PageSpeed Insights, “minimize the main thread works” is one of the most common warnings you may often come across.

During the HTML parsing time, when a browser comes across a render-blocking file (unoptimized JavaScript and CSS), it pauses the parsing. It starts to execute the unoptimized files, increasing the Total Blocking Time, which leads to a slow website.

In such cases, minimizing the main thread tasks can improve the website’s Total Blocking Time (TBT) as well as PageSpeed performance.

Optimize the CSS file

When it comes to boosting the page loading time, CSS optimization is one of the essential web optimization techniques. Reducing the unused CSS (the CSS styles that are not utilized in current web design) can reduce the total page size, which improves the page loading time.

However, to achieve a superior PageSpeed performance, you need to generate a separate file for the CSS styles that are essential for the initial page loading (also known as critical CSS).

A few WordPress optimization tools like WP Rocket can reduce the unused CSS from the CSS file, however, it’s unable to generate critical CSS.

On the other hand, RabbitLoader helps you to achieve a 90+ PageSpeed score by reducing the unused CSS and generating the critical CSS.

Defer the JavaScript file

An unoptimized JavaScript file is often considered a render-blocking resource as it increases the Total Blocking Time as well as page loading time. Defer the non-critical JavaScript function is one of the easiest as well as effective ways to improve the page loading time.

Due to the difficulties, only a few optimization plugins can optimize the JavaScript files like, RabbitLoader, Autoptimize, and others. To avoid the coding, you can use those plugins to optimize your JavaScript file effortlessly.

Conclusion

While TTI measures a website’s responsiveness, optimizing TTI helps you to provide a seamless user experience. In this guide, you have learned the TTI and how to measure it.

Also, we have explored the easiest three ways to improve the TTI performance as well as a website’s performance. Thus, if you seriously want to enhance your user experience, you need to optimize the TTI performance.

Source - https://rabbitloader.com/

Google boasts of including ‘hundreds of fonts’ that can be used when creating a website. But, how do you utilize them as and when you are working on a certain project?Well, this is what we are going to try and cover in this article here and a lot more along with it.

[https://rabbitloader.com/articles/best-google-fonts/]What is a Google Font[https://rabbitloader.com/articles/best-google-fonts/?

Technically speaking, the Google font is basically a collection of interactive application programming interfaces that enable the users to apply the web fonts for their websites. Not surprisingly, the Google fonts are absolutely free for public use along with the bandwidth.

NOTE: [/b]One can use the Fonts only over the internet and cannot be installed locally, also they work only through your browser.

The Google Fonts were launched in 2010 and soon grew to become the largest open-sourced, free collection of Fonts available over the internet. Also, the Google Fonts website allows the users to access and use the Fonts easily for their website.

[b]The Google Fonts: Who are they Meant For?

The best part about the Google Fonts is that practically ‘anyone’ can use it with much ease. Some of the much visited users include the likes of: UX designers, Graphic Designers, Developers, researchers, Social Media managers, Bloggers, Photographers and more. It is also easy to spot the application of the google Fonts in your everyday life in Billboards, wedding invitations, presentation decks, posters, books and what websites
z.

How To Use the Google Fonts for your Website

Let us now get started with how to use the Google Fonts for your website:

1. Navigate over to the Google Fonts Website

From here, the user will be able to select from over 853 Font options. You can also use the filter to best customize your choice based on Style, Popularity, Languages, Weight.

2. Next Locate the Fonts You prefer

You can directly locate your font of choice, if you know the ‘Font Family’ name, here.

3.Next Click on (+) once you are ready to use it

Every Font family comprises the (+) option located at the upper right hand corner. Click on this option and add this Font Family over to the ‘Selection Drawer’ that is displayed at the very bottom of the screen.

4. Now, repeat the steps from 1-3 if you wish to search for more than one Font to use.
5. Next click on the ‘Selection drawer’ to display all the fonts that you have selected.

This is the place where you can take a better view on all the fonts added by you. Here, you can also find the code to add over to your website. Also, you can simply download the fonts on to your website.

6. The ‘Selection Drawer’ is where you can ‘pick’ the code to Copy and Paste within your websites CSS and HTML code.

It is at the Selection drawer that the user can copy and paste the code onto the CSS and HTML. To be able to allow the Google Fonts to work, it is required that the user has Google Fonts API within the HTML to be linked with both the font family. Also, make sure to specify the font family in the CSS.

7. You can Add Various Styles and Weights If Required by selecting the ‘Customize’ option.
It is here that you can finally add the various font styles and Weights onto the font families, before you proceed to add them to your website. However, keep in mind to add only those Fonts and Weights that you think you require. This is mainly because the more fonts you add, slower will be the load time on your site.

8. Next, Copy the HTML code and paste it on to the <head> of the website.
Now, we have almost come to the end of How To Apply the Google Fonts. All you need to do is copy and paste the HTML and CSS code onto the website. To do this, you need to first copy the HTML link over to the <head> of the HTML document.


9. Now copy the CSS rule and paste it on to the CSS file of your website.
Lastly, all you need to do now is copy and paste the CSS rules onto the CSS file. In case you prefer to add just a single Google Font, you can do so by simply adding the CSS font family rules onto the body tag. If not, you need to ensure that you are adding it on to the right elements within the CSS files.

10. LAstly, Save

After all the steps have been followed, you simply have to save both the CSS and HTML files and then refresh the website. Finally, at this step you can view the new font.


CONCLUSION
So, there you have it friends, this is all that is needed on How To Apply the Google Fonts. Was this article helpful? Do let us know in the space below and we would love to hear from you.