Improving server response time

Hello @hrishikeshbharaligmailcom

Hope you are doing well!

I’ve visited your site and looks like Page Caching is not enabled. Please enable it from Hummingbird > Caching > Page Caching. This will reduce the server response time.

What can be further done to improve the Server Response Time score?

Looks like you’ve done a lot to improve the server response time, the next step would be is to upgrade your server resources.

Third-party plugins also affecting the server response time, try minimizing your use of plugins and remove the plugins you do not need.

Check the numbers of elements on the home page that can be removed. The fewer elements are there, the faster your site will be loading.

Should I implement File Caching, Key-Value Caching and Standard HTTP caching as described in this article?

The Standard HTTP caching is already done by the CloudFlare. The Hummingbird Page Cache caching files extensions like .css and .js and the CloudFlare caching the following files:
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-Which-file-extensions-does-Cloudflare-cache-for-static-content-

Feel free to try out all the caching options one at a time, to see which is the best works for your site.

Kind regards,
Nastia

Hello Nastia @wpmudev-support9 ,
Thanks for your reply. I am happy to report that I have enabled Page Caching and my Server Response Time score has improved to 67/100 and the response time itself has improved to 0.9 – 1s.

I have a follow-up question to the second part of your answer:
Since I am on the free tier of Cloudflare, it is caching my static assets on its CDN sever but the HTML page itself isn’t cached. My understanding from your reply is that the Hummingbird Page Cache also does the same asset-based caching but on my origin server which improves the Server Response Time. Now if I want to dynamically cache the HTML page (dynamic cache which clears itself when the post is updated), what are my options? Since my site is hosted on Apache Server, is mod_cache or mod_pagespeed a suitable option to achieve this? My goal is to improve the page speed performance of my site.

Hello @hrishikeshbharaligmailcom,

hope you’re doing well and don’t mind me chip in here! ??

The Page and HTML caching you’re referring to, it’s actually the same thing, as HummingBird is creating static HTML files for your pages, as these are getting rendered in the browser.
In order to have better caching, you will need other levels of caching, which can be installed in the server-side. These can be some Object Caching solutions like Redis or Memcached that are used to cache the DB queries rather than the rendered HTML pages.

Hope that was some help!
Warm regards,
Dimitris

Hello Dimitris,
Thanks for clearing that for me. I am already doing the following:

Running PHP 7.2
Installed Zend OPcache
Installed Redis for Object caching
Enabled Page Caching & Asset Optimization (as much possible without breaking the site) in Hummingbird
Using Cloudflare CDN

Is there any other form of Server-side Caching that can be done?

Hey @hrishikeshbharaligmailcom

As long as you have all these, maybe you should re-examine the sets of plugins and theme that you’re using, as you may be able to cut-down in JS/CSS requirements.

Another famous caching solution is Varnish:
https://varnish-cache.org/intro/index.html#intro

You could also try to implement a file caching setup in your Apache, like in the tutorial you shared, better try in a staging site first though.

Thank you,
Dimitris

I will definitely try those out. Thanks, Dimitris for bearing with me. I am really grateful for your assistance.