How to speed up slow document interactive time

The term “document interactive time” refers to the time while a page is loading, when the user can start interacting with the page. It’s actually a metric that calculates the amount of time, in seconds, it takes to arrive at the interactive point after a link is clicked. The result is displayed as a percentage of the total length of time to load.

The document interactive time measurement begins when the real page content starts loading into the visitor’s browser. During the interaction period for the document, the page is still loading, but it has enough content for the user to start interacting with the page. The user will most likely be able to see some text, click on a hyperlink, and view one or more images. 

Even though the majority of the material is in the process of being loaded at this stage, the document interactive time is a factor most visitors will use to form an opinion regarding how quickly or slowly a page loads. And that has a major impact on bounce rate that then affects search engine optimization (SEO). 

Metrics that factor into document interactive time

A web page is perceived as having a slow document interactive time if it takes longer than one second for your page to become interactive. The only way to solve this problem is to improve page load time.

The average page load time is the most crucial System Performance Metric for a website. Google Analytics calculates the load time by integrating seven distinct metrics:

• Redirection time
• Domain lookup time
• Server connection time
• Server response time
• Document interactive time
• Document content loading time
• Page download time

The average page load time is the typical amount of time it takes for a page to fully load over the time specified by the sample data set. A page’s average load time is measured from the moment a user initiates navigation (by clicking a link on your site or another site that links to yours) to the moment that page fully loads in their browser. This statistic is the most comprehensive time-based metric because it includes all the other metrics. As you can see, page download time is one of the key metrics. 

The average page load time is calculated by adding the times recorded for each of the seven metrics that are used to evaluate the site’s performance. From the time a user clicks a link until the time the entire page loads should take no more than two seconds.

Fixing slow document interactive time

The only way to address slow document interactive time is to speed up the downloading process. That requires analyzing the elements on the page to determine what’s slowing things down. It could be uncompressed CSS files or simply too many elements on the page. 

There are a lot of reasons a web page could be slow to load. Regardless of the cause, a tool like evisio makes analysis quick and easy by reviewing pages for you. You can even figure out if loading could be a potential issue so that you can optimize web pages in advance and avoid negative SEO impacts. 

Check out more of our articles for additional details on speedin up slow loading pages.

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