First Byte Time?

[Ae9803]

How important is it to have a good rating on this? What can cause a bad rating? Any ideas how to improve? I use a LEMP stack with ZendOP, I use digital ocean as the host.

[Aussie Cable]

TTFB (Time To First Byte) metric is affected by 3 main components of your server infrastructure:

1. Time it takes for a request to propagate through the network to your web server

2. Time it takes for the web server to process the request and generate the response

3. Time it takes for the response to propagate back through the network to a browser

To improve your servers TTFB, you should decrease the amount of time for each of the above components. To know where you should start, you need to know how to measure your servers TTFB.

You can use WebPage Test to see your servers TTFB, another tool is GTmetrix.

A simple way to improve TTFB is to use a CDN, using a CDN may reduce the distance between your members and the server. Other ways, is to disable not needed add-on's and/or modifications of IPB. Some other ways to improve TTFB is to optimize the server back-end, such as using Nginx, PHP-FPM and changing to MariaDB etc however, if you use a host, this may be impossible because you do not have control over what is installed on the server itself. Hence it is best to use a VPS (virtual private server, shared resources) or VDS (virtual dedicated server, dedicated resources) or using a dedicated server (server in the rack).

TTFB is rather important for your own Google search rankings, however in the end it is just as important to your members (and yourself). I recently found an add-on to my own IPB was causing a TTFB of an extra 2000+ms, so it can be a great incite to find issue's where you do not expect them.

Using Zend Op-cache is a great way to decrease TTFB, it can help drastically.

I am sure there are plenty of resources out there to help you improve your TTFB, but it will be difficult if you are using a host and do not have a dedicated server, Google TTFB or Time to first byte, you have much reading to do :thumbsup:

[Ae9803]

Hey,

Thanks for that! I use a unmanaged host which is nice. But thanks for the help :)

Jake

[Aussie Cable]

Sure, your welcome :thumbsup: