www.nationalacademies.org speed test — 20 Oct 2026

The first byte arrived after 5443 ms. Of that, 295 ms was the server thinking and 5148 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.

1 text response(s) of 10 KB or more are sent uncompressed, and the document itself is not compressed. That is 79.6 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.

2 image(s) over 200 KB and 6 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.

The page transfers 2.16 MB across 26 request(s), with the document itself at 56.1 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.