Most customized Uscreen sites load within the two-second mark, and vanilla Uscreen sites load roughly within 1 second based on GTMetrix (server located in Vancouver, CA) which is an exceptional speed for web pages with extensive dynamic media content..
Home Pages
According to Pingdom Tools (server located in Washington DC, US), the site loads in 0,8 seconds.
NOTE: Testing on servers outside North America may produce slower results in the speed test. This behavior is expected because the test does not consider the CDN (Content Delivery Network), which has POPs (points-of-presence) worldwide.
The loading speed decreases as you add customizations and third-party integrations. We recommend keeping a good balance between customization and performance.
For instance, using GTMetrix's Waterfall, we can observe that all internal components from Uscreen loaded in 1,1 seconds. However, Stripe's validation finished around the 3-second mark.
While it does not impact the user experience because it runs in the background, some speed tests may include it in the total loading speed, which will give you a higher loading time than reality.
Also, when we check the size of the scripts on a Uscreen website, we can see that our internal code operates around 30% of the website. In this example, the tested website uses Stripe as the payment provider and integrations, such as Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Based on Google's Lighthouse Treemap.
NOTE: You can ignore some recommendations that these test results can provide. They are helpful when you build your site from scratch but not relevant when using a SaaS service like Uscreen.
For example, some speed tests may recommend implementing gzip compression, image optimization, and caching. However, our platform already has these settings enabled via our CDN (Content Delivery Network).
This help guide covers the website loading speed itself, not the media. If you experience slow loading or playback issues on your videos, please ensure you follow our technical recommendations - most playback issues are caused by non-optimal encoding.
Catalog Pages
According to Pingdom Tools (server located in Washington DC, US), the catalog loads in 1,72 seconds.
NOTE: Testing on servers outside North America may produce slower results in the speed test. This behavior is expected because the test does not consider the CDN (Content Delivery Network), which has POPs (points-of-presence) worldwide.
The loading speed decreases as you add more content to your catalog. We recommend arranging your content in collections if it reaches an excessive size.
For instance, using GTMetrix's Waterfall, we can observe elements from the first chunk of the catalog load within two seconds. It includes all videos from the first four categories.
At this point, the site is fully functional, chunks of the featured videos will continue loading without affecting the user experience, and other chunks will load as you scroll down.
Our Catalog page has additional loading optimization features:
Images are rendered in
webp
format based on the screen resolution with 2x and 3x options for retina displays.The Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores a copy of the optimized images in the nearest point-of-presence for your end-users
Lazy loading for catalogs with more than four categories.
Once cached, you will notice the catalog page will load even faster. For instance, it can load under the two-second mark.
A cached version of the Netflix catalog will load in 2-3 seconds for your reference.