Unable to find solution on First Byte Results

Hello Everyone,

After all these days of testing, I am here looking for help.
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151029_ET_GH3/1/details/

Got this time B for first byte time … usually it’s F or D.
I am struggling to improve this to compete with my competitors. But I am not really good at server side so can you guys help me?

My competitor:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151029_HC_GEG/
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151029_9D_GJG/

I guess due to First Btye I am not ranking well in search results. Anyone heard if the site speed is not good then search engines will ignore to rank?

Looking for experts to answer and help me in this case.

Thanks

I am not sure that your ranking is due to the first byte time. Search ranking will depend on a lot of factors like the content, the term that your users were looking for and the speed of your site as well.

In your case, the TTFB is decent. You do get a grade ‘B’. But, I would focus more on the “Start Render”. Of the 3 sites you’ve mentioned, you have the slowest start render. For your end user, it would mean 3+ seconds of white screen. Due to this high start render, your speed index score is the highest as well.

If you look at the waterfall, you are calling a font file at 105th request. Due to this, rendering is delayed. Can you move this up your waterfall? Doing so will help browsers build the CSSOM earlier and render the content and load the images in parallel.

Eg: I just blocked the “.woff2” fonts. If you see the waterfall, your start render is now down to 1.5s and the SpeedIndex score reduces to 2273 (lower is better).
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151029_QM_c62e6304a920ed4be4734657c7de26ee/9/details/

So if I were you, I’d focus on getting these other numbers down and then worry about TTFB. Hope it helps.