www.psychologytoday.com/us speed test — 20 Oct 2026

Measured from the wfix.shop server on 20 October 2026 at 12:43 UTC. Grade B (86/100), with the screenshots, the timings and the fixes that matter.

https://www.psychologytoday.com:443/us

20 October 2026 at 12:43 UTC · Free test · report pt_532736e51196

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Grade

86/100

Performance92/100

Structure76/100

11 audit(s) passed, 5 need work

First byte (TTFB)490 msmeasured from this server

Fully loaded1.50 sfirst byte + slowest asset

Requests26document + assets

Page weight744.7 KBcompressed transfer

HTML document28.2 KBgzip

ProtocolHTTP/3nginx/1.26.3

Third-party716.5 KBother hosts

Where the first byte went

DNS lookup 51 ms 10%
TCP connect 89 ms 18%
Server wait 350 ms 71%

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

First byteslower than 54% of 4,999 pages tested here490 ms against a median of 448 ms

Page weightheavier than 54% of 4,999 pages tested here744.7 KB against a median of 650.3 KB

Fully loadedfaster than 70% of 4,999 pages tested here1.50 s against a median of 1.84 s

Requestssends more requests than 100% of 4,999 pages tested here26 against a median of 26

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 490 ms. That is workable, and the cheapest win left is caching or a warmer connection.
The page transfers 744.7 KB over 26 request(s). Images files are 96% of it, so resize and recompress the largest images before anything else.
The HTML itself arrives gzip-compressed.
It runs over HTTP/3, so the assets share a connection instead of opening one each.
96% 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 600 ms, inside the 2.5 s Google calls good.
The main thread was blocked for 22 ms in total, which is not enough to feel.

Fix first: Server response time (TTFB) - 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.

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.

Desktop screenshot of www.psychologytoday.com — **Desktop** 1366 × 768 · 547.9 KB · page is 6000 px tall

Mobile screenshot of www.psychologytoday.com — **Mobile** 390 × 844 · 94.2 KB · page is 6000 px tall

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.

Largest contentful paint600 msgood is under 2.5 s

Cumulative layout shift0.000under 0.1 is stable

Total blocking time22 mslong tasks during load

First contentful paint552 msfirst content on screen

Browser page weight1.93 MB118 request(s), scripts included

Failed requests5blocked or unreachable

Largest contentful paint600 ms

Goodgood under 2.5 s, poor over 4 s

Cumulative layout shift0.000

Goodgood under 0.1, poor over 0.25

Total blocking time22 ms

Goodgood under 200 ms, poor over 600 ms

Page weight by type

What the page is made of

Images 25 requests

716.5 KB 96%

Transfer size, compressed as sent. 26 request(s) in total, 744.7 KB across all of them.

Top issues

Server response time (TTFB)

high impact

The first byte arrived after 490 ms. Of that, 350 ms was the server thinking and 140 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.

Image delivery and format

medium impact

0 image(s) over 200 KB and 2 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 impact

16 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 impact

1 third-party host(s) serve 716.5 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.

Avoid extra redirects

medium impact

3 redirect hop(s) before the page load started, each one a full round trip before the first byte.

Fix: Link to the canonical URL (and make sure http, the apex domain and www all point at it) so no visitor pays a redirect first.

Waterfall

Slowest requests

IMAGEScdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/styles/magazine_384x504/public/…

1.01 s

IMAGEScdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/styles/magazine_384x504/public/…

991 ms