xkcd.com speed test — 20 Oct 2026
Measured from the wfix.shop server on 20 October 2026 at 13:41 UTC. Grade A (92/100), with the screenshots, the timings and the fixes that matter.
Where the first byte went
- DNS lookup 58 ms 27%
- TCP connect 30 ms 14%
- Server wait 130 ms 60%
Measured on the connection that fetched the HTML. Every other request on the page waits for the end of this bar before it can start.
How this page compares
Every report published here is in this comparison, so it is a reference population of pages tested from one server - not a benchmark of the whole web.
What these numbers mean
- The first byte arrived in 217 ms. That is workable, and the cheapest win left is caching or a warmer connection.
- The page transfers 551.2 KB over 10 request(s), which is lean. Images files are 99% of it, so resize and recompress the largest images before anything else.
- The HTML itself arrives br-compressed.
- It runs over HTTP/2, so the assets share a connection instead of opening one each.
- 97% of the weight comes from other hosts (analytics, fonts, embeds), which also means their slow day becomes your slow day.
- The largest element painted at 372 ms, inside the 2.5 s Google calls good.
- Layout stayed still (CLS 0.051), so nothing jumps under the reader's cursor.
Fix first: Image delivery and format - Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG fallback, size images to the space they occupy, and lazy-load anything below the fold. Images are usually more than half of a slow page.
Read on one shared server, not a visitor's phone: use it to compare pages against each other, not as a promise about every connection. We fix what these tests find.
Screenshot
What the page looks like
Loaded in headless Chromium on this server. Click an image to open it full size.
Browser render
The same URL loaded in a real browser, so these are the readings curl cannot produce. The grade above is still built from the server measurements.
Page weight by type
What the page is made of
Transfer size, compressed as sent. 10 request(s) in total, 551.2 KB across all of them.
Top issues
Image delivery and format
high impact1 image(s) over 200 KB and 3 large image(s) still served as JPEG or PNG.
Fix: Serve WebP or AVIF with a JPEG fallback, size images to the space they occupy, and lazy-load anything below the fold. Images are usually more than half of a slow page.
Cache static assets
medium impact2 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.
Third-party weight
medium impact1 third-party host(s) serve 536.2 KB of this page. Each one is another DNS lookup, TLS handshake and point of failure you do not control.
Fix: Self-host the libraries you can, drop the tags you cannot justify, and preconnect the ones you keep.
Mobile viewport
medium impactNo viewport meta tag, so a phone renders the desktop layout scaled down.
Fix: Add a viewport meta tag with width=device-width and an initial scale of 1.
Strict-Transport-Security
low impactHSTS is not set, so the first visit on a hostile network can still be downgraded to HTTP.
Fix: Send Strict-Transport-Security with a max-age of at least six months. Add includeSubDomains once every subdomain is HTTPS.
Waterfall
Slowest requests
Each bar is one request's own response time, scaled to the slowest. Assets were fetched in parallel, so the bars overlap in real time rather than stacking. first party third party
| Request | Type | Status | Time | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fusion_device_2x.png 3rd party | images | 200 | 534 ms | 210.7 KB |
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fusion_device.png 3rd party | images | 200 | 506 ms | 100.5 KB |
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/s/temperature.png 3rd party | images | 200 | 497 ms | 27.1 KB |
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/s/a899e84.jpg 3rd party | images | 200 | 471 ms | 21.0 KB |
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/store_news/news_back.png 3rd party | images | 200 | 461 ms | 44.9 KB |
| https://xkcd.com/s/0b7742.png | images | 200 | 455 ms | 10.7 KB |
| https://imgs.xkcd.com/store_news/news_back_2x.png 3rd party | images | 200 | 417 ms | 132.1 KB |
| https://xkcd.com/s/7d94e0.css | css | 200 | 416 ms | 1.1 KB |
| https://xkcd.com/s/919f27.ico | images | 200 | 411 ms | 738 B |
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