How to Measure and Reduce TTFB for Your WordPress Site
As a business owner, your job doesn’t end after creating a website. Even if it is a website solely to increase your online credibility, it needs to be snappy. As a freelancer with an online portfolio site, you are losing customers if the site takes too long to load on the devices of potential customers.
TTFB (Time to First Byte) is a terrific score to track your website’s loading speed. It is the amount of time your browser takes to access the server and download the first byte of data from your site. When you hire a dedicated WordPress developer, they can speed up your website and bring down the TTFB score to provide a better user experience to your customers.
Before reducing the TTFB score, here’s how you can measure it:
There are several online tools that allow you to measure TTFB for free. Some of the most notable ones include:
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- GTmetrix
- WebPageTest
- SpeedVitals, and more.
Some of these tools also allow you to check the TTFB score at different geographical locations. While 0.8 seconds is an ideal score, as long as you keep it under a second, you don’t have anything to worry about. Just enter the page URL in one of the tools, choose the location or other customizations, and run the scan.
Tips to Improve Your Site’s TTFB
1. Switch to a reliable host
Despite its numerous advantages, WordPress is clunky and slow. So, you need to start out with an excellent host for your website to keep it snappy. A reliable hosting provider can make a world of difference to the response time of your website.
Moreover, you don’t necessarily need to spend exorbitant amounts on a reliable host. Offshore WordPress development companies in India usually prefer Hostinger and BlueHost for their amazing service and affordable long-term plans. You can get a four-year plan for less than $100 and that’s a bargain for a crisp and fast site.
2. Use CDN for heavy content
If you’re a business that has customers across the nation or the globe, using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can drastically bring down your Time to First Byte. Think of Content Delivery Networks as a mesh of proxy servers that store a copy of your site’s content.
When a visitor from another country or state opens your website, the cached version of your videos, images, GIFs, and other ‘large’ content gets delivered to them from the closest proxy server. Web development companies in India recommend clients adopt a CDN like Cloudflare with a vast network of data centers on every continent. With CDNs, data transfer becomes remarkably efficient and your content gets delivered to user devices within 100 milliseconds.
3. Use a caching plugin
Caching works on a crucial part of the TTFB process and helps eliminate repeated MySQL and PHP queries from being executed repeatedly. With a caching plugin, the dynamic content on your website is stored locally on user browsers. If your hosting plan doesn’t come with a caching plan, consider adding a third-party caching plugin to your website.
4. Keep themes, plugins, and software updated
WordPress themes and plugins are core components that decide how the website looks and the features it has. They are highly customizable and are constantly improved to provide better features, aesthetics, ease of use, or security. When you don’t update all the themes and plugins, it can lead to broken features, security leaks, and a slow website.
The same holds with the WordPress and PHP versions on your site. Update them to the latest version or consider hiring a WordPress developer in India who can maintain your site and update it regularly to keep it snappy.
5. Get rid of clutter
Website slowdowns and high TTFB time are synonymous with clutter. You can’t move around in your home freely when it’s full of clutter and junk. Your website is the same. Every unnecessary plugin on your site is added weight that can be shed to make it quicker. On the other hand, it’s also important to conduct an audit of your website and replace slow plugins with more efficient alternatives.
Fast loading speed is directly linked to your site’s SEO and indirectly affects your conversion ratio. Use these tips to reduce your TTFB timing and ensure that your visitors experience lightning-fast website loading speeds.