Hi all, thank you very much in advance for any input. I’m running a site using WP Ecommerce along with cache system (W3 total cache). The cached pages load really quick but there are times when a page isn’t in cache for some users and many of my pages have an awful TTFB of 10 seconds when not in cache. Usually these pages have a fair amount of images on them but they have been minimized for the most part and it seems TTFB isn’t related to this? I hit my link to any of main product pages such as Photography Archives | Artprintstopia and it just sits there often times for 10 seconds before even going to the page. Here is my test result when page is not in cache. Can any of the experts out there pinpoint an issue or two that is causing this long delay? Thanks!
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120807_73_344b56baa5d64cbeea31d0dbfe7c91d0/1/details/
TTFB is not related to the images. When the page isn’t in cache you are seeing the native performance of your app and hosting. You can try to identify the database queries to see if you have some plugins that are exceptionally slow but more often than not the only way to get it to perform well is to switch hosting to a provider that doesn’t have crappy database performance (and most of the cheap shared hosting providers have abysmal database performance).
WPEngine is really good for Wordpress-specific performance (and not particularly expensive, right around the cost of a cheap VPS).
Thanks a lot for the tips Patrick! I’ll take a look.