Super long wait time (TTFB)

  • Greetings,
    I recently developed my first homepage to get customers for my own little photobooth business in Munich, Germany – [ redundant link removed ]
    Unfortunately, my page speed varies from very fast (less than one second) to super annoying slow (up to 16 seconds) on Pingdom.tool (just tested while writing this post and had a speed of 15.39 seconds). When the page speed is low, Pingdom (and other page speed testing tools) refer to the Time To First Byte – TTFB.

    I tried to access my page from different PCs and different phones. The speed varies a lot over the trials. Sometimes it loads immediately, sometimes after 20 seconds.

    – The hosting provider is Strato, a German hosting company with shared hosting
    – The page is optimized with WP Rocket (nearly everything available in this plugin).
    – I use Cloudflare in its free version.
    – The page uses SSL and cookies from Facebook and Google.
    – SSL is redirected with ?Really Simple SSL“ and ?Enable 301 .htacces redirect“ is activated.
    – All my images are compressed.
    – My page is visited not very often (maybe 5 – 20 times per day).

    Can anyone of you guess the source of the super slow loading time? Could it be my provider, a plugin, the cookies, SSL or anything completely different?

    Cheers,
    Jakob

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Well, I went to it and refreshed the page multiple times and it always came up in a couple seconds. It was still fine after turning off ad and tracker blocking. Ran GT Matrix and it was fine: https://gtmetrix.com/reports/jakobsbox.de/0ItyH8Zw

    So.. hard to say. Are you able to check the server load (CPU usage) in cPanel or whatever when it’s slow?

    Loaded up just fine for me over here in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (USA).

    And that photobox thing is cool. I really don’t see any problems from here with the site. It would be nice to be able to see some photos. Maybe some of your client’s might share a few with you.

    Also, I’d turn on the ‘stream’ in your Facebook Widget. Sometimes Facebook’s widget will slow the site loading but it’s worth having that.

    Thread Starter jakobsbox

    (@jakobsbox)

    Hey, many thanks for your replies!
    Strato does not provide cPanel (as far as I know). I wrote a support mail to them but they always say that the server is fine… What else should they say…

    Thank you for your feedback JNashHawkins! It’s unfortunately not easy to display pictures of people on a webpage without their informed consent in Germany… There are way too many rules over here ?? But I will ask a few people and maybe someone will agree.

    I will further investigate the problem and write an update if I find out something new.

    One more thought…

    You mentioned using CloudFlare. I’d watch for ‘500’ errors coming from CloudFlare. If you don’t see those then your server is actually responding fast enough to keep CloudFlare happy and you can pretty much rule out the host server causing any speed issues.

    If Cloudflare is happy then you should be achieving good response numbers from your site. Do make sure CloudFlare is actually proxying your website (the cloud will appear Orange in the Cloudflare dashboard).

    If you really want to, you could disable Cloudflare’s proxy while letting them do your DNS (highly recommended) while you test without Cloudflare. It’s possible the local Cloudflare points of presence might not be as robust as your web host’s server in your local market area… but I’d doubt that.

    I’m very ‘pro CloudFlare’

    Thread Starter jakobsbox

    (@jakobsbox)

    Hey JNashHawkins,

    many thanks for your effort! I was super busy the last weeks but have a little time to work on my homepage again during the Easter holidays ??

    I watched the behavior over the last weeks and I figured out that loading my page from a device that has never load my page before is mostly just fine. But when I load my page after one day of absence with my PC (that should have my page still in its cache), the page takes more than 10 seconds to load.

    This behavior also applies to speed test pages such as Pingdom.

    I uploaded a few images to imgur.com that shows a page loading time of 15.39s

    View post on imgur.com

    View post on imgur.com

    View post on imgur.com

    View post on imgur.com

    View post on imgur.com

    Loading the page a second time with Pingdom results in nice loading time of 1.04s.

    Is there anything one can get out of the information provided from Pingdom tool?

    Best regards from Germany

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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