How do I improve Time To First Byte to less than 500ms

Hello

Everything on our website has been optimised as much as possible, we've got a decent Google PageSpeed Insights score of 90 for desktop and 76 for mobile. However, since migrating to a Linode (2GB for testing) and ServerPilot combo the TTFB has been between 486ms and 600ms. Is there anything else I need to configure to improve this?

Would adding CloudFlare into the equation help in this regard?

One reason I ask is that we are a local company and our main Google competition while being worse in PageSpeed Insights etc all have a faster TTFB. Our site is based on a London node and tests were done using GTMetix etc testing from London, our business and the majority of our clients would be from this area.

Our website is at Vernacular Homes Ltd

Many thanks

Marcus

3 Replies

Your server is responding very slowly, ask your web developer or sysadmin to benchmark the backend and improve.

This is a really easy fix. Your performance plugins aren't set up right.

Nowadays, less than 100ms TTFB is getting the norm from the 500ms mark mostly because of the increased use of CDN and the improvement in website speed. The most important things you can actually do are as follows:

  • use a fast authoritative DNS provider - see the DNS providers comparison from DNSPerf.
  • use full-page caching if your site isn't static in nature like for sites built using WordPress
  • use a fast CDN provider - see the fastest CDN providers comparison from CDNPerf.

If you do only these 3 things, without worrying about anything else, your site should still see a significant speed boost. But if you want to dive deeper, see this in-depth guide on improving TTFB.

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