Many of you check your rankings on a phone between other work. The mobile network is often busy or weak. On that kind of connection, RankMySEO used to make you wait. Sign-in first contentful paint (FCP) took 7.4 seconds in a lab test.
In a Chrome Slow 4G lab test with an empty cache, sign-in first contentful paint now falls to 1.6 seconds. The page downloads 295 KB instead of 1,368 KB.
What feels different
The sign-in page shows up sooner. On a slow 4G connection in this lab setup, first contentful paint is 1.6 seconds instead of 7.4. The photo beside the form arrives in 3.7 seconds instead of 8.5.
You can start the person check sooner. Sign-in runs a quick check that you are a person. It used to start only after the whole page had loaded, about 6.0 seconds into the slow test. Now it starts at about 0.3 seconds on /login and /signup, while the form is still loading.
Screens open without a blank page. When you move from Overview to Position tracking, or from Keywords to Competitors, the menus stay put. The site switcher stays too. Only the area in the middle shows a short "Loading…" while that screen arrives.
Coming back is faster still. Your browser now keeps the dashboard files between visits. On your second visit, it skips most of the download.
The numbers
We used the Chrome Slow 4G profile (150 ms of delay, 1.6 Mbps down, 750 Kbps up). Cache was empty. Builds were the real production dashboard.
| Page | Metric | Before | After | Download before | Download after |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sign-in | First paint (FCP) | 7.4 s | 1.6 s | 1,368 KB | 295 KB |
| Sign-in | Main image (largest contentful paint) | 8.5 s | 3.7 s |
A lab test is not a real phone in a real city. Treat these as a before-and-after comparison on one setup, not a promise of the time you will see.
What we changed, in short
- The dashboard sends the screen you open, not every screen at once.
- The animated background behind the sign-in form loads after the form.
- Our logo went from 205 KB to 948 bytes. The sign-in photo is about 20 KB on a phone. WebP srcSet: 20 KB at 640 px, 47 KB at 1200 px.
- Two parts of the dashboard no longer fetch your account and site list twice.
- Your browser keeps the dashboard files for a year, and an update still reaches you straight away.
We also reorganized the code behind the dashboard, so fixes and features take less time to ship.
If a screen still feels slow on your connection, tell us through Support. Say which screen it was and roughly where you were.
For the engineering write-up, see How I improved RankMySEO sign-in performance.
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