www.ugent.be speed test — 20 Oct 2026

The first byte arrived after 614 ms. Of that, 391 ms was the server thinking and 222 ms was connection setup. A first byte under 400 ms is what a visitor feels as instant.

Fix: Cut server think time: page cache, query indexes, fewer synchronous calls to third parties inside the request. Connection setup is distance, so a nearer region or a CDN edge helps instead.

5 text response(s) of 10 KB or more are sent uncompressed, and the document itself is not compressed. That is 858.2 KB of compressible text.

Fix: Turn on brotli (preferred) or gzip for text/css, javascript and text/html in the web server. This is the cheapest win available on almost any site.

8 render-blocking resource(s) in the document head (0 script(s), 8 stylesheet(s)). The page cannot paint until each one arrives.

Fix: Add defer or async to scripts that do not change the first paint, inline the critical CSS, and load the rest with media="print" plus an onload swap.

The page transfers 942.6 KB across 26 request(s), with the document itself at 7.6 KB.

Fix: Work through the heaviest assets first: images, then fonts, then third-party scripts.

1 asset(s) answer without a Cache-Control max-age, so browsers revalidate them on every visit.

Fix: Version filenames on change and serve them with a long max-age plus immutable. That is what makes a returning visitor fast.