What are the Essential Tips to Improve Your Magento TTFB?

Magento TTFB

TTFB is an acronym for One of the most essential speed measures for a website is the time to first byte. It displays the amount of time between when a user enters your Magento Web Development Services store URL and when they receive any response, even if it is only 1 byte; hence the name, time to first byte.

Humans and search engine robots both dislike waiting, therefore the time to first byte is critical. Google, in particular, despises slow sites and lowers their rankings greatly.

At the same time, John Mueller, one of Google’s spokespeople, has provided strong proof that Google does not use TTFB for rankings. According to him, the Google recommendation for SEO is to concentrate on user experience and business performance rather than TTFB.

However, we’ll discuss why Magento TTFB is more crucial than full page load, also known as “time to last byte,” and what recommendations you’ll need to optimize it. Because the faster users can start reading your material, the faster you load the first byte. It makes no difference that they can’t see every image on the page right away. It’s more crucial to provide users with something else while your web service loads the remaining material.

The main focus of the article is the essential tips that will help you improve your Magento TTFB in no time. So; without any further ado, here it goes.

Essential Tips to Improve Your Magento TTFB

1. Understanding The Magento Store’s Bottlenecks For Getting Eliminated

Define A Good TTFB?

The goal, according to Google, is to have a TTFB of fewer than 200 milliseconds. The search engine would give you the top ranking if your response time is less than 200 milliseconds. If you exceed this threshold, Google will penalise your website. If your response time is higher than 600 milliseconds, you won’t even pass Google’s TTFB test.

Your TTFB will be influenced by a variety of variables. Presented in no specified sequence;

1. on-page code execution delays
2. web server configuration and resources
3. network conjecture
4. nameserver resolve speed
5. backend caching methods implemented

Use a third-party service like the Google TTFB test to evaluate your Magento TTFB value. You may also correlate your results to those of popular websites or your competitors to gain a different insight into how your store performs on mobile devices. On the other hand, Magento 2 Profiler is another excellent diagnostics tool. It allows you to quickly examine and analyse every page request by breaking it down into smaller chunks.

Pay close attention to two key values in the table: Time and Count. The concept of time is self-explanatory. It’s the time it takes for the server to respond to the user’s request. The Cnt column indicates the number of times a particular item was invoked prior to producing the output. To evaluate database queries, Database Profiler should be used in collaboration with Magento 2’s default profiler.

The first thing you should do is enable Magento Profiler and examine the pages that have the most TTFB issues. While the default profiler can be used, we recommend that you use Profiler SQL. It’s free and gives you a quick summary of how many requests you’ve had in a given session.

All requests will be sliced into smaller pieces by the Profiler, allowing you to identify which bits are slowing you down right away.

2. Migrate To a More Appropriate Database Engine 

If the Magento 2 store database is inefficient, slow, or employs a storage engine that isn’t the ideal solution for handling Magento, it can quickly become the major performance bottleneck.

What is the significance of this? MySQL has a wide range of storage engines to choose from. We identified at least ten approved alternatives in the original MySQL documentation, and we’re sure there are more out there.

While the usual MyISAM MySQL engine can be used with Magento, other database algorithms such as MariaDB Aria storage engine or Percona XtraDB engine could render your website store with greater stability and make it work with greater speedier than the default setup, occasionally.

When Magento encourages the storage engine to employ a lot of transient tables, the Aria engine, for example, takes a more intelligent approach.

Percona is a MySQL clone that has incorporated a variety of performance enhancements to expedite database queries over time. It is substantially faster than MyISAM and specialises in transaction processing. It can handle a large number of parallel queries.

Even while the best advice for database optimization is to carefully assess your demands and select the engine that best matches you, we have a few pointers that everyone can benefit from:

• If you’re looking for a store, don’t use MySQL’s default settings. Install Elasticsearch to speed things up all of your website’s search queries
• Choose the database engine that best suits your needs

3. Matching Server Setup To Meet Your Magento Store’s Current Traffic Needs

It is not a smart idea to scrimp on infrastructure. A steadily developing company will see more clients, transactions, and orders over time. As a result, it’s a great way of keeping your setup at 80 per cent capacity to account for unexpected usage spikes and event-driven foot traffic. That 20% can help you maintain a reasonable standard of achievement in any situation.

A good hosting company will tell you what system requirements you’ll need to keep things running properly. However, if your company has developed substantially over time, it is your obligation to create an upgrade roadmap.

There are a few key locations in the Magento store that would have a significant impact on your system requirements:

1. the size of the store includes the number of store views
2. the catalog’s categories and SKUs, with attributes and attributes, set included
3. statistics on average traffic, which includes average page views and historical peaks
4. each day’s total transactions include digital downloads, payments, and similar operations

In general, the amount of CPU power you require is directly proportional to your average traffic. To develop a dynamic web server profile, align your RAM to the CPU demands after you’ve determined the best CPU setup.

Because the capacity of your database is determined by your present RAM, you should purchase only enough to meet your immediate needs. Make a performance cushion to give yourself some breathing room. It’s a good idea to have at least 20-25 per cent of your CPU and RAM free to deal with traffic spikes.

4. Establish A Better Setup For Caching Solution

Well after the discovery of french fries, website caching would be the next best thing. The website’s snappiness is improved by using a server cache, which makes it feel considerably faster. Caching works by transferring frequently accessed data from a hard disc or an SSD to RAM.

Whereas HDDs and SSDs can read data at speeds of up to 200 MB/s and 3200 MB/s, DRAM modules can read data at speeds of up to 20 GB/s. This gives us an x10 difference, or at minimum one order of magnitude difference.

Redis and Varnish are two of the most common Magento store upgrades. It’s a cache management option for Magento 2 that’s highly recommended. Both solutions are also compatible with Magento 1.

Varnish is a difficult technology to set up, but when done correctly, it may achieve TTFB values of 100-200 milliseconds. Magento TTFB will be between 250 and 500 milliseconds for full-page cache settings.

Varnish also has the advantage of working on a larger number of web pages. While FPC doesn’t function for websites with a lot of interactive web content, Varnish performs better even in these difficult situations.

5. Removing All The Unnecessary Extensions

In all honesty, deactivating unnecessary extensions is the most important recommendation for any Magento 2 business, although it is frequently forgotten. Every plugin you install on your website consumes several of your resources. They might even slow down your Magento TTFB if they are implemented incorrectly.

Also, keep in mind that the server must first run this code before sending any feedback to the customer.

Magento will run faster if you clean up your extensions list. Even if you can’t disable any of them, keep your Magento store and third-party extensions up to date to take advantage of bug fixes and optimizations that would undoubtedly improve the efficiency of your site.

6. Make Changes To The Store And Customer Logging Settings.

Make sure that Magento customer logging is turned off. This will allow you to spend less time on database searches. Because customer logging is a modest task, it hasn’t had a significant influence. The amount of performance improvement will be based on the number of the customers who are currently visiting the store.

We do not advise you to disable store logging. It’s a useful tool for diagnosing Magento issues. Instead of allowing store logs to consume server resources, you can send them to a third-party service like Papertrail.

The Never-Ending Struggle For The Excellence 

There are no two Magento stores alike. When it comes to optimizing their storefronts for speed, each of them will encounter unique obstacles. This is especially true for Magento websites that seem to have a multitude of different and a lot more complex third-party extensions, vast databases, and several stores, which are older and already larger than others.

While we will never be able to “win” this performance struggle, our common aim is to make Magento stores the best in class in terms of speed, user experience, and security across all eCommerce websites.

However, for the best possible efforts what you can do is contact Magento 2 Migration Services, like Folio3. We are a leading eCommerce development company striving for the best possible solutions related to all eCommerce platforms including Magento. With us, you get to hire Magento developers, who are the best of the bread along with the best Magento 2 cost for everything and anything you need for your Magento 2 store.

Conclusion 

Database cache, disc IO, Swap consumption, RAM, PHP settings, MySQL settings, network settings, TLS overhead, and so on are just a few of the things you may improve or modify to lower TTFB. However, the ones listed above are rather simple to execute and will provide you with the quickest performance improvement. So, the very next time someone calls you about how to lower your TTFB, keep in mind that a speedy WordPress server, CDN, cache, and DNS all play a significant role. It will be enough to fix or improve such bottlenecks.

FAQs 

What is TTFB? 

TTFB is a metric that counts the time between making a resource request and receiving the first byte of a response. The total of the following request stages of TTFB;

• The time it takes for a service worker to be redirected
• The time it takes for a service worker (if applicable)
• DNS lookup
• Connection and TLS negotiation
• Request until the first byte of the response arrives

Lowering TTFB can be achieved via reducing latency during connection setup and on the backend.

What is Magento Profiler?

Magento 2 includes a built-in Profiler that allows you to track the performance of your store and improve memory and code execution time. Furthermore, Profiler may provide dependency graphs, allowing you to catch Magento-created but never-used items.

What Causes TTFB?

TTFB is caused by a number of different factors. Dynamic content production is the most typical reason for a high TTFB. This is the amount of time PHP and database queries take to create your web pages. Large files, excessive or sluggish database queries, and auto load data are the key contributors to slow dynamic content production.

What is a good TTFB score? 

Because network access and application backend stacks vary so much, it’s impossible to put a numerical value on what constitutes a “good” TTFB score. Because TTFB comes before user-centric metrics like First Contentful Paint –FCP and Largest Contentful Paint –LCP, it’s best if your server answers to navigation requests quickly enough for the 75th percentile of users to have an FCP that falls under the “good” level.

How to enable the Profiler in Magento 2?

There are two ways with which you can enable the Profiler in your Magento 2 store stated below;

• By Using .htaccess file:

We can enable the Profiler by adding following statement in .htaccess file:

SetEnv MAGE_PROFILER <type>

where, <type> can be “csvfile” or “firebug” or “html”.

In case of “csvfile”, you can find the report in var/log/ dir.

• By using CLI:

You can run the following command to enable the Profiler:

php bin/magento dev:profiler:enable <type>

where, <type> can be “html” or “csvfile” or “flagfile”.

In case of “flagfile”, a flagfile named as profiler.flag will be created inside var/ directory.

A side note; if you don’t specify a type while running the command, the “html” type profiler will be enabled by default.

If you have enabled the “html” type Profiler. The result is always displayed in the footer portion of the web page.