How to Identify and Fix Slow-Loading Pages with Safari Web Inspector

There are billions of websites on the Internet, and people who visit them expect to do so seamlessly. Websites that load slowly tend to have a high bounce rate, which can reduce their performance on search engine result pages. Businesses with slow-loading websites will likely suffer a drop in sales, so their owners should know how to identify the web pages that load slowly and fix them.

People often use smartphones to visit websites, so business owners must optimize the performance of their mobile versions instead of focusing exclusively on the desktop versions. To identify and fix slow-loading web pages, web developers use tools like Web Inspector. Web Inspector can be found in browsers like Safari and Chrome. iPhones are a common choice of smartphones amongst consumers, so it is crucial for entrepreneurs to use Web Inspector to fix websites that do not work well on Safari.

Guide to Using Web Inspector on Safari

To use the Web Inspector iPhone tool to optimize a website, you may need an iOS virtual device or a physical iPhone connected to a Mac. On the device, go to Settings, click on Safari, click on Advanced, and toggle on Web Inspector. Once the device is connected to the Mac via USB or a USB emulator, follow the steps below: 

1. Enable Web Inspector on Safari

Open Safari on the Mac and go to Preferences, then find the Advanced tab and check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar” box. The Develop menu will then be visible in Safari’s top menu.

2. Identify the slow-loading issue

To diagnose the issue behind a slow-loading webpage, open it in Safari and click Develop and Show Web Inspector (alternatively, press Command + Option + I). Then click the Network tab to see the resource loading times. Afterward, reload the page and observe the loading sequence.

3. Analyse key metrics

To fix the issues affecting a web page, you need to analyze the following metrics:

• Load Time and DOM Content Loaded: This is how long it takes a page to become interactive.
• Waterfall Chart: This chart shows the load time for each resource
• Time to First Byte: This metric shows the server response time.
• Largest Contentful Paint: This is the amount of time it takes the largest visible content on the web page to load.

4. Fix slow-loading time

After identifying the issues based on your findings from analyzing the metrics listed above, implement the solutions below where applicable:

• Optimize heavy resources: Web pages may load slowly because they contain heavy images, videos, and amination. These resources need to be optimized to make the web pages run better. For example, you can use WebP images instead of JPEG and limit the amount of custom fonts on a slow web page.
• Reduce JavaScript execution time: You can do this by reducing or removing unnecessary JavaScript code and deferring JavaScript files that are not essential.
• Minimize HTTP requests: You can do this by enabling browser caching, combining multiple JavaScript and CSS files, and using a content delivery network to serve assets quicker.
• Improve server performance: You can do this using a reliably fast website hosting provider, enabling caching, optimizing database queries, and implementing Brotli compression to increase data transfer speeds.

Endnote

By using the Web Inspector on Safari, you can quickly identify the issues making web pages load slowly and fix them. To keep a website working well at all times, you have to constantly monitor it and implement the optimization solutions discussed above. This will also enhance the user experience and improve the website’s SEO performance.