The speed of your website is one of the crucial elements in terms of the user experience and SEO. In case if the site loads too slowly, people are less likely to wait until it is fully loaded and will just navigate away from it. Google uses website loading time to determine its place in the SERP.
There are two factors that play a role in increasing the performance of your website and improving its user experience and SEO – TTFB (Time to First Byte) and Core Web Vitals.
This guide will show you how to optimize TTFB and improve Core Web Vitals in order to increase the speed of your WordPress website.
Table of Contents
What is Server Response Time (TTFB)?
Time To First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for your visitor’s browser to receive the first byte of data from your website server after initiating a request.
If you have a bad TTFB, it can mean that you may have any of the following issues:
- Your hosting servers might be overloaded.
- There may be some server configuration errors.
- There are issues with your database queries.
- Your website has inefficient codes.
- Your website does not have caching enabled.
- High server resource utilization.
Google typically suggests keeping the server response time as short as possible in order to enhance the user experience.
What are Core Web Vitals?
These are performance metrics by Google, which assess how your website is perceived by the users.
There are three basic metrics, which include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It measures how fast the largest page element is loaded.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – It measures the responsiveness of your website to user interaction.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – It measures the visual stability of your website.
How to Reduce Server Response Time (TTFB)
1. Get High-Quality Web Hosting
The web host has a major influence on server response time.
Look for web hosting which provides:
- SSD or NVMe fast storage
- Optimized web servers such as LiteSpeed
- PHP 8.x version
- HTTP/3 protocol
- High uptime
- Built-in caching options
- Sufficient CPU and RAM resources
In case the performance of your hosting does not satisfy you and you face speed or uptime issues, switching to a professional hosting will drastically change the situation. We provide optimized environments with fast response times and high reliability.
2. Use Server-Side Caching
Caching helps to cache the pages which were requested many times so that the server does not need to render the same page again.
The types of caching include:
- Page caching
- Object caching
- Opcode caching
- Browser caching
- Caching decreases the load of the server and TTFB.
3. Using Content Delivery Network (CDN
The CDN will mirror your website onto many different servers across the world.
Rather than processing the request from one particular server, the CDN will provide the request from a server closer to the visitor.
Some of the benefits of using CDN are:
- Reduced latency
- Increased speed
- Reduced server load
- Increased efficiency across the globe
4. Optimizing Your Database
Large and untidy databases cause slow server response time.
Some of the things that you should do frequently include:
- Removing unused revisions
- Deleting spam comments
- Clearing out any expired transients
- Database table optimization
This is especially necessary for WordPress websites.
5. Updating PHP and WordPress Site
Earlier versions of PHP are much slower compared to later versions.
This means that you should regularly:
- Update PHP version
- Update wordpress core
- Update themes and plugins
6. Upgrade PHP and Website
Outdated PHP usually has poor performance.
Make sure you have an up-to-date:
- PHP version
- WordPress core
- Themes
- Plugins
Updating improves performance and security. Read more on how to update PHP.
7. Remove Heavy Plugins and Scripts
Each plugin will take more time to load.
Do a regular audit of your site and delete:
- Inactive plugins
- Unnecessary duplicates of functionality
- Page builders that are not used anymore
Fewer plugins lead to quicker server response time.
Improvements to Core Web Vitals
1. Optimize Images
Images usually are the largest file types on a web page.
To make the images load faster:
- Compress the images
- Use new image formats like WebP
- Serve the right-sized images
- Enable lazy loading
Small images help with LCP greatly.
2. Minify CSS and JavaScript
Get rid of unnecessary elements in your files like:
- White space
- Comments
- Code not used anymore
Here’s how to upload a website with JavaScript in cPanel.
3. Defer Unnecessary JavaScript Files
All JavaScript files do not need to be loaded immediately.
This will enable quick loading of other key elements of the website and enhances both LCP and INP.
4. Adopt GZIP or Brotli Compression
Compression reduces file size.
Benefits of compressed files are:
- Speedy loading of files
- Saving of bandwidth
- High speed
Most modern web hosting modern web hosting services have automatic compression on by default.
5. Get Rid of Render Blocking Resources
CSS and JS files that are loaded before visual contents will slow down the page load time.
Do the following wherever possible:
- Inline critical CSS
- Defer non-critical scripts
- Strip off unwanted external resources
This will ensure visitors can view the content faster.
6. Minimize Layout Shift
An unexpected layout shift causes bad user experience.
Reduce CLS by:
- Specifying image sizes
- Allocating ad slots
- Not loading any dynamic content above the current content
- Using consistent fonts
Website Performance Monitoring
To assess the results of optimization, test your website with reputable performance tools that allow you to monitor:
- TTFB
- LCP
- INP
- CLS
- Page loading speed
Performance optimization is an ongoing process and not a one-time procedure.
Causes of Website Performance Issues
In case your website is still experiencing issues, the reasons behind poor website performance may include:
- Affordable shared hosting
- Many plugins installed
- Large images
- Inadequate theme optimization
- Slow database requests
- Too many external scripts
- Heavy server traffic
Understanding the underlying cause allows optimization.
Conclusion
Lowering TTFB (server response time) and improving Core Web Vitals is one of the best ways to optimize site performance and SEO. Websites that have fast loading times keep users on site longer, convert more often, and become more likely to show up in search engine results pages.
For those who are interested in hosting with speed and performance in mind, HarmonWeb has everything you need: optimized hosting services with advanced server technologies, free SSL certificates, experienced support, and infrastructure built specifically to help your website get perfect Core Web Vitals scores.
