www.aol.com speed test — 20 Oct 2026

The first byte arrived after 704 ms. Of that, 599 ms was the server thinking and 105 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.

12 render-blocking resource(s) in the document head (1 script(s), 11 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.

7 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.

2 third-party host(s) serve 353.7 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.

The document transfers 406.0 KB. A bloated document delays every other request, because nothing else can start until it is parsed.

Fix: Paginate long listings, move repeated markup into a template, and stop inlining large data URIs into the HTML.