time to first byte - 22 secs!

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hi all, have slowly been getting into optimizing my website.

did a check and found out my website has a 22 secs of time to first byte! yikes!

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120106_3Y_2RVX0/1/details/

have read up abit, and have just installed W3 Total Cache. i think it helped, but not sure how much.

i’m using this plugin called wp-answers, which i suspect is the main source of the long TTFB. but i cant remove this plugin, as the whole site is based on this plugin.

any advice would be much appreciated. thanks.

Tan

2

have also just enabled cloudflare. but doesnt seem like its doing much good.

3

Yeah, cloudflare (and just about every accelerator) can not help with first byte times, they can only work on the page after it has been produced by the server.

If you turn on the debug settings in W3TC you should be able to see what is causing the slow times and hopefully track it back to a specific plugin. I have a couple of screen shots at the end of this article: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/when-good-back-ends-go-bad/

At the end of the day, it’s a combination of the site code and the hosting provider’s database/server performance that is causing the issue.

4

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for the reply and tips. The weird thing is, i’ve installed W3TC and enabled it. But i cant seem to see the debugging info in the HTML. any ideas why?

5

Sorry, I think there is a forum for W3TC where Frederick (the author) might be able to help. Not sure what would prevent it from loading.