I discovered an even better solution several months after doing the video below, so I decided to embed it in this article. If you want to check out the solution I use, Nitropack, for yourself, click here and if you want to use our coupon, you can get 5% off your first year with the code “Sagapixel”
Video Transcript
How to Get an Acceptable TTFB
What is up everybody? This is Frank at Sagapixel, an elementor web designer, and in this video I’m going to show you how to get your Elementor, Visual Composer/WP Bakery, Divi, or other page builder, WordPress website to have an acceptable time the first byte. So let’s check it out.
Visual Pagebuilders Often Don’t Have a Great TTFB Out of the Box
If you’ve spent any amount of time working with visual page builders, you’ll notice that a lot of them have a terrible time the first byte. In this case, this is a website that we built with Elementor a few months back and it has a time to first byte that’s well over a second.
By the end of this video, you’re going to see that I’m going to get this down to a fraction of that. So let’s jump in.
Use Your Browser to Check TTFB
The first thing we’re going to do here is, instead of using something like GT Metrix, I’m actually going to use the browser here.
I’m in Firefox, but if you’re in Chrome, there are similar tools. You just need to inspect, go to the inspector, click over to network, and then we’re going to do a hard refresh of the page. In this case, I’m going to max, so I hold shift and click on the refresh button, which empties out, and look at that, a 1.4 second time the first byte.
That is terrible. What I’m going to do to start off is go into the backend of the website, close this out, and we’re going to go over to the plugins.
WP-Optimize to the Rescue
Now, the plugin that we’re going to be using is called WP Optimize. This plugin is going to allow us to preload a lot of the pages on the web or all the pages on the website so that we don’t have to wait that 1.4 seconds for stiff to start getting delivered to our browser.
I’m going to go over to add new. I’m going to look for WP Optimize. Now, another thing that I want to point out is that if you have a caching plugin already installed on the website, you probably want to deactivate and get rid of it. Having more than one caching on a site can cause some problems, so be conscious of that.
Delete Other Caching Plugins
In this case, I have a WP Super Cache installed. I’m just going to delete it because I’m not going to need that anymore with this. I’m going over to settings, we are going to go over to database.
Clean up the Database
The first thing I’m going to actually do is clean up some of the database, click on run all the selected optimizations. If you’re in the middle of editing the website, you may not want to do this right here.
This one specifically, will erase any sort of old versions of the posts that you had, so be conscious of that. We’re going to go over to cache, we’re going to enable page caching. And I’m actually going to set this out.
Preload the Cached Pages
I’m actually going to go over here to the preload next.
So we’re going to click on run now, and this is going to start the preload. That means it’s going to be going through the website, and like it sounds, it’s pre-loading the page, so we’re not going to have that super long time the first byte, and we’re going to get this stuff.
Check if GZIP is Enabled
We’re going to get a much better score when it comes to our Google page speed insights. Other things, we’re going to go check out the GZIP. GZIP is enabled, which is great.
Let’s Check it Out Now
All right, and this is done. So I’m going to logout of the site. And we’re going to go to the front-end again. Network, and I’m going to do another hard refresh. 0.2 seconds now, so we brought this down from 1.4 seconds all the way down to 0.2 seconds just by enabling the preload of the page.
I hope that this was helpful. If it was please like, please leave a comment. I do check it. You’ll probably get a response from me. And if you’re interested in learning more about SEO and WordPress, make sure you subscribe to our channel. Thanks.
