Slow time to first byte

I know I should have a time-to-first-byte of under 1 second, but it is actually closer to 2 seconds. Can anyone suggest to me how to improve this?

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110609_J6_SN9D/

Can anyone make any suggestions on how to speed up a joomla site time to first byte?

I haven’t played with 1.5 but are there any page caching options available in the joomla config? I know 1.6 has some level of page caching available. If you can find it, try turning it on and then run several tests to see if the tests after the first one perform faster (the first visit is usually necessary to build the cache).

I’ve spent a bit of time on that. I’ve got cache enabled and set to 1440 minutes in global config. I have found it I turn on the system-cache plugin or try any other cache plugin that it breaks my website.

I’m running maxCDN, and I’m not sure if maybe that is slow or my website host, rather than my site? I’ve sent the host company an email to ask if maybe it is something at that end.

It just seems like a really really long time to first byte.

The slow first byte times from Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal, etc are usually because they tend to make a LOT of database calls in order to generate the pages. A page cache helps avoid that (when it is working) but it’s not usually something that is caused by the hosting provider (though their databases are usually not the fastest).

maxCDN won’t impact your first byte times for the base page, those are going directly to the site, only the static content is coming from MaxCDN.

It doesn’t look like the page cache is working because the first byte times are long even for subsequent tests (I ran 5 from Australia here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110609_6S_SR9Y/ ). You can REALLY see the impact of all of those separate files using IE7.

Once you get the first byte times under control it looks like there are a crazy number of separate css and javascript files - that’s not going to help make anything faster. Any chance you have a bunch of plugins installed that you don’t need? Each one is generally going to make things slower.

Besides the built-in tools as part of joomla there aren’t really great tools for automating the performance (though if you have a VPS or dedicated server you can try installing mod_pagespeed but that will only help with the individual files, not the first byte times).

Any chance you can port the site to Wordpress instead? The W3 Total Cache plugin for wordpress is pretty amazing and will handle the page caching as well as automating the resource combining (and CDN integration).