Reduce initial server response time

Time to First Byte (TTFB), also known as server response time, is the time it takes for the browser to receive the first byte in response to the browser request.

Reducing TTFB  is a must, as it affects every resource referenced within your HTML, and directly affects how long it takes for your website to load.

A slow TTFB result in your visitors may only seeing a blank page while the browser is waiting for a response from the server, which is a bad user experience.

How does server response time affect page performance?

When a user requests your page, this request needs to be sent to the server, and the server needs to generate a response and send back your page resources.

This entire process depends on multiple factors such as network transfer speeds, latency, efficiency of the application code, and performance of the server.

Put simply, if any of these elements are slow, your TTFB is affected.

While this audit looks at the initial server response time, it does contribute heavily to your TTFB and you should aim to optimize TTFB.

How to reduce server response times with Staq

Generally, using our tool will either reduce or eliminate this from being an issue.

However, there are 2 features that you can adopt that will assist.

Go to Staq Panel for the site in question and deploy either:

• Next-Gen CDN (recommended)
• Traditional CDN

Traditional CDN

The Traditional CDN will offload to AWS CloudFront the following:

• images and videos
• plugins
• theme

All requests are made to the server.

Next-Gen CDN

By enabling the Staq Next-Gen CDN feature, all traffic will be rerouted to the cloud/CDN. That means the site becomes geo-redundant and the website is being served from the closest data center to the user.

You can still access the backend of WordPress, make your changes as you normally do, and push the website static files back to the cloud.

The Time To First Byte (TTFB) and load time will be relatively similar across the globe. Typically, optimized sites are fast in the same location as the origin server but are slow across the globe. Next-Gen CDN eliminates this issue.