Solving Time to First Byte ( TTFB ) in WordPress

Do you use WordPress?

Do you use Nginx as the Web Server?

Do you use SSL as well, because hey, a ranking factor.

And your website loads like this?

Well, that’s probably because your Server is taking too much time to respond to the first request, which in technical terms is called Time to First Byte or TTFB in short.

Not sure what the TTFB of your website is? Visit here and find out. If it is less than 300 milliseconds, then you don’t need to read it further ( You can of course), else if it is anything more than that, pay good attention now!

Explaining TTFB

Here is how it works.

• You hit the website address from your browser ( say https://codeforgeek.com)
• Now browser first contacts your name server, and then finds out the location of the web server.
• Web Server, upon getting the request, processes the response ( This one is the problem ) and sends it back to the browser ( It’s called Server loading time).
• The browser then starts rendering ( This is your browser loading time).

If you have static content, say a few HTML pages, then the Web Server will return it in a few milliseconds. Quick like a lightning bolt!

But WordPress ain’t a static thing, it’s very complex software and since there is PHP involved, which in turn executes the code behind the scenes to generate the response for your request.

The time your PHP and Web Server are taking to prepare the first byte or first response to the browser is TTFB or Server response time in SEO terms.

What is my TTFB?

I own a blog called https://codeforgeek.com, and here is the TTFB of my blog.

it’s 210 ms, < 300 ms.

What was it?

And what was the TTFB before solving the issue? Here it is.

Yup! 3 f**ing seconds

It was 3 seconds! Too far from the recommended one.