Help! Slow TTFB with EE site
News and General
Hi,
I have an ongoing TTFB problem & i’ve reached the limit of my knowledge (i’m the site owner, not the dev) so any help would be totally appreciated. An overview…
- site is www.feathr.com
- built on EE v2.9
- hosted with nexcess on shared servers in the UK
we’ve optimised the site to the hilt (images, JS reduction, plug ins etc) & have a CDN in place. Pingdom gives us a total site loading time (testing from Stockholm) of 1.5s:
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/I3X2Y/https://www.feathr.com/
But 1s of that is waiting for the server to respond - and that 1s hasn’t improved during recent optimisation.
I’m sure that traffic overloads are not the problem (we’re well within our data limits) & I know that other sites on the same shared server achieve 0.2s-0.3s server response time…so the issue seems to be site side.
can anyone advise on where to start looking for potential bottlenecks/causes?
Thanks, Tom
If you are on shared hosting, the server response time is going to be pretty much out of your control and you should have Nexcess look at it. You’ve worked to optimize your load/delivery times, but the server software, resources, hardware, network etc. could all be an issue on the response time.
And to be honest, I’ve had slow response times from Nexcess shared hosting too, running from their Michigan location. So, if they can’t help, you may need to secure a higher performance plan with them or find another host.
I ran a couple of tests (using gtmetrix.com) and got a TTFB of 0.6s and 0.7s.
Saying that I visited your site using Firefox and Chrome and the home page loaded in a flash (I’m in the UK), so perception wise it’s very fast indeed - that’s what really matters for your customers.
As Jeremy said it’s worth getting Nexcess to have a look to see if anything can be improved, but with shared hosting there’s inevitably always going to be a slower TTFB because you’re sharing resources with other sites.
thanks Rob & Jeremy - do you have any recommendations on hosts for EE other than nexcess?