In a recent blog post, the Yottaa Team announced the release of our new waterfall chart, and reviewed its groundbreaking filtering and sorting features.  Today we’ll discuss the deeper drill-down data available within the waterfall.

Our waterfall chart has always featured mouse-over stats that break down the load time within each asset: the waterfall within the waterfall.  Now, clicking on a URL in the chart produces a new dropdown menu, which shows even more comprehensive detail on each asset.

The dropdown displays as many as 37 pieces of data in an intuitive and interactive chart.  The data is broken into Overview, Request Headers and Response Headers tabs.  It includes information on load time, where the asset comes from, and how it arrives at the browser.  Plus it displays inside the waterfall, so you wont lose your place on the page and can quickly scan the data on a number of assets.

Why is In-Depth Information Important?

More information means more opportunity for performance improvement.  Nearly every asset out of dozens or hundreds on a website can be improved through web performance optimization, so knowing everything there is to know about each asset is essential for building a completely optimized website.

The request and response header information displays the raw HTTP, which contains all the instructions for the Server and Client.  There are key performance notes to be found here, such as whether the asset has been compressed (via the accept-encoding response header, below showing gzip compression).  A developer could also find out how long the browser should cache the asset based on the response header.

Try it for Yourself!

We encourage you to explore our new waterfall chart.  To do so, go to websitetest.com, and enter a URL in the box on the right side of the top navigation.  Then click Page Load Time in the left-hand navigation, and the waterfall chart will appear along with an interactive performance graph.

In our next post, we’ll explore upcoming features currently in development that will help to bridge the gap from insight to action.  (See the grey buttons next to “Actions” above?  They won’t be grey for long!)

Please let us know what you think of the new features in the comments or @Yottaa!