How do I fix "high response time" warnings from Google Webmaster Tools?

Question

In my Google Webmaster Tools account, there is warnings about my site:

Some URLs listed in this sitemap have a high response time. This may indicate a problem with your server or with the content of the page.

They are particularly talking about the location.html page. This page address has maps that are available. What do I need to do to fix this?

Solution

First, I would run some tests on that page using one of the following tools:

1) Google Page Speed

2) WebPageTest.org

These two will give you an idea of why your page is slow to respond. It could be the map taking too long to call home or it could be something related to your hosting environment. Usually if its your hosting then the entire site would be very slow.

Second, analyze the reports and identify the issue. Below are some things to look out for:

1) Bad FTTB (First Time To Byte) - 9 out of 10 times this means that you need to switch hosting

2) Any pages that are over 1 MB in size. You should avoid having any of your pages blow up like that. Common causes for this are big images that have not been optimized for web or a lot of extra code (usually happens with CMS)

3) A very high number of connection requests. For a small static site I would say that anything over 30 requests is too much for a single page. For a CMS site I would say anything under 60 - 80 is a norm.

4) If you use social media buttons on your site then look out for connection requests that take a very long time. Sometimes Twitter takes forever to load over https.

In conclusion. You can identify 99% of these issues using the tools provided above and they are pretty simple to fix once you know what they are.

Comments

[user319940]

I guess it's talking about how long it takes to load the content of the page. Has your webhost had some downtime? Do you have any big images or JavaScript on the page that could be slowing it down substantially? These should be your first checks.

[Stephen Ostermiller]

I just found a dup for this question. Your answer is very good and I would suggest you put it on the duplicate as well. Just change a word or two so that it doesn't automatically trigger a "same answer" flag.

[JakeTheSnake]

Hopefully I'm not too late to the game to ask my own related question. Google Webmaster shows this error to me for one specific URL; however that URL is not functionally different from any other of the same type. For example the errant URL is "/products/124", even though I have many other similar URLs like "/products/13" and all of those pages are exactly the same save for differences in product details. Is Google just aggregating all of those URLs into one warning?