: How to improve load time when Pingdom says 80% of the load time is the web browser waiting for data from the server? tools.pingdom.com gives a speed analysis of any given website. What does

@Kristi941

Basically "Waiting" can have lot of meaning and are given below :

1 - May be your server response time in high , I mean slow.

2 - Your coding has issues OR it has not standard way to retrieve resources.

3 - Images used in website are not optimized and having huge size in MB.

4 - May be you are calling more 3rd party scripts

5 - Your way to loading site resources may not be standard

So there can be anything as reason of waiting.

I recommend you to use : Google page speed OR GTmetrix to analyze your site and to get actual issue of slow loading.

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@Angela700

I'm gonna assume that the website you tested is dynamic. It's probably made in PHP, ASP, or some other scripting language that produces output based on the operation of running code (other than HTML) and the input passed into it (including user's ip, etc).

When the script as well as server resources are poorly used, long wait times result.

For example, Say the website has a gigantic database in the background with 1 billion or so records. Seeing that I work with databases myself, trying to get a count on a huge amount of records even on a fast system takes time in milliseconds, and these milliseconds add up, and if the script that produces the page you're trying to view ends up trying to get a count on the billion of records several times throughout the script without caching the results at all then the waiting time can be very large and I personally would fire the programmer of the company if I had the power.

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