What exactly is DOM Load time?

Question

What exactly is DOM Load time? Is it time to just get complete html from server or does it include the rendering time? Please explain.

Answer 1

Roughly speaking, load time includes:

• Getting all markup, replaced element content and embeds from server
• Parsing the markup
• Applying the CSS cascade to the markup
• Rendering the page
• Running all scripts that need to run on page load (which may include scripts that get more content and cause further parsing and rendering)

From the user's point of view, load time is the time between navigating to a page and being able to access, visually and every other way, the finished output.