How can I reduce time to first byte (TTFB)? Doesn't seem to be host problem

  • My site: northeastpcg.com

    Consistently has a very long TTFB (between 4 – 12 seconds depending on the site used for analyzing. I know the pages are rather large, but I’m ok with the speed at which the rest of the content loads, I just don’t want the long TTFB time where only a blank screen is shown.

    It’s on GoDaddy shared hosting, which I know is bad, but I don’t think that’s the issue because:

    – The site also loaded slow while in development on a different Bluehost VPS.
    – The GoDaddy hosting account was previously hosting a different WordPress site that had an acceptable TTFB.

    I have tried the following with seemingly no reduction on TTFB:

    – Disabling all plug-ins (except 2 that the theme depends on)
    – Switching to default 2016 theme with no plug-ins running

    What else can I try to find the problem?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Hi,

    TTFB is caused by the code you are running, the PHP code.

    I don’t know your level of dev skill but here’s what I would suggest.

    – Setup xDebug and check your potential bottlenecks in PHP load.

    That way you can see if the theme is the problem. For instance, we’ve changed one function to another and we saved 1s of load.

    https://am2studio.hr/blog/profiling-a-wordpress-site-or-how-we-shaved-almost-a-second-off-server-response-time/

    Thread Starter AndrewCoco

    (@andrewcoco)

    Thanks klaudiom for the response!

    Are you saying the TTFB in my case is definitely the PHP code on my site? Or just that in general the PHP of a site can effect TTFB?

    Unfortunately I’m not skilled enough to setup xDebug, so any advice or alternate options there is appreciated.

    Thanks again.

    Hmmm, it might be because of your hosting then.

    Yeah, in general PHP can affect that but so can bad shared hosting. But you said it was also slow on Bluehost VPS.

    Maybe it could be related to that plugin you need.

    I had the same problem. The culprit was W3cache plugin.I switched to wp super cache. My ttfb went down from 3-7 seconds to 0,4 seconds

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘How can I reduce time to first byte (TTFB)? Doesn't seem to be host problem’ is closed to new replies.