Although the contents of a site ideally appear in the browsers in just a few seconds this is the result of a complex process that has several distinct steps.
The first part of this process is called the DNS Lookup.
Internet-enabled devices identify each other with a long number sequence; the IP address.
When you type an URL into the address bar of your browser and press Enter, your computer first connects to a DNS server which will look up and send back the requested domain’s IP.
The browsers are only able to connect to the websites that you’d like to visit once they received this information.
After the DNS lookup, the browsers have to take four more additional steps in order to display the contents of a website.
WebyMon measures the length of every step that is needed for your website’s content to appear.
If you’d like to know how fast your website’s DNS server handles the requests from your visitors, click on the performance tab in our app after selecting an URL and turn off every other metric by clicking on them.
You can find additional information about the steps that are needed to display your contents in this post and in our articles about Content Generation, Transfer, Connect, Request and building up a Connection.