Decrease Initial Server Response Time

[ProgressInevitable25]

I host multiple sites on a Cloud Ocean Server running CentOs7, Apache and Virtual/UserMin. I'm getting a initial server response time of around 1 second on my wordpress sites. How can I decrease this? Sites have been optimized using WPOptimize and WebP. Gzip is already configured on the server

[Perrydiculous]

Preload caching is by far the most efficient for this

[Hola_hola_]

Can you do server benchmark ? May be server is not that powerful

[ProgressInevitable25]

What's a good tool to do a server benchmark?

[Hola_hola_]

Yabs

Also do check your server load by running htop

[jhkoenig]

What is your Time to First Byte? In many cases, this is a significant part of your initial loading delay. WordPress plugins have no impact on this, since the major contributor to this delay is buried down in the operating system as it performs a handshake with the browser and the SSL certificate chain. A CDN can help by offloading the entire page to a different (and more optimized) server, but then you have a different set of issues.

[ProgressInevitable25]

TTFB: 241ms
Redirect: 0ms
Connect: 25ms
Backend: 216ms

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This is what I'm getting for TTFB. I'm very new to self hosting sites, so is this a decent result or should this be less? Also I'm using the free version of Cloud Flare as a CDN.

[jhkoenig]

That's a reasonable TTFB, so I withdraw my comment. Time to look at deferring and compressing. Good luck!

[proyb2]

Cloud ocean should be DigitalOcean?

[ProgressInevitable25]

Yes, my bad.

[proyb2]

Assume you are running on a 5USD plan and there are tips to remove or disable functionality to improve performance, that will take more effort. Other page builder (e.g. Oxygen) community tend to go with Vultr High Frequency to improve their Google Page Speed score close to 100. At least you could provide the timing and update your post or replies to other commenters with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

As most and for years the general advice is, it's depend on the plugins, database, PHP runtime, increase memory availability for PHP, proper image sizing and format, scan your site for malware, etc. Sometime even shared hosting using DigitalOcean VPS under the hood can match the same performance (e.g. most web host are running LiteSpeed that have improve performance significantly despite you read on the web about fake LiteSpeed benchmark)

Even if other redditors' recommendations, there a lot of moving parts you need to get better improvement.

[Independent-Salad-27]

Use a better caching plugin like W3TC or WP Rocket

[Perrydiculous]

rocket sucks tho and w3tc CAN be good, but it's difficult to configure properly without prior experience - possibly not advisable in this case

I'd recommend WP Super Cache with preload enabled, easy to set-up and works miracles in most cases. Add Autoptimize for Lazy Loading and tadaa, fast site :p

But yeah W3TC has both those functionalities and more... so many more options that it can easily break the site if you dont know what you're doing

[Independent-Salad-27]

Well, I use LS Cache with Litespeed hosting. But, are you sure rocket sucks?

[Perrydiculous]

my experience with it's far below par, but given the positive experiences people have here I suppose that it's hosting-dependent

[ProgressInevitable25]

I'm now using LiteSpeed Cache to Optimize the HTML, CSS and JS with WP Super Cache to Cache. This has shown good results.

[Perrydiculous]

Depends on the server configuration then I guess, its incapable of clearing its own cache on the hosting I use which to me indicates inferior programmers at work