8 Ways to Effectively Reduce Server Response Time

Bot management DDoS

One of the biggest factors in determining your website’s loading speed is initial server response time. As the name suggests, server response time is how quickly your server responds to user requests, and it significantly affects your site’s user experience (UX).

In this guide, we will discuss how to identify the reasons for slow server response time, and how to reduce initial server response time.

What is server response time?

Server response time is a metric that describes how long it takes for a device (i.e. a computer) to receive feedback from the server after the device successfully sends a request to the server to load a web page.

It is an extremely important metric to measure, since a lot of web apps can’t function without this feedback. At the same time, a long server response time will translate to a long waiting period for the user, during which the web page isn’t showing at all or is shown with errors (half-loaded images, broken layouts, etc.).

Thus, a slow server response time won’t just affect load speed, but also the visual stability for the users, which is measured with another metric called cumulative layout shift (CLS).

Using a more technical term, server response time is also called Time to First Byte (TTFB), since it measures the time required by the server to send a single byte to the user as a response to the user’s request.

Why You Should Reduce Server Response Time

According to Google, people will leave a website if it loads in more than just three seconds.

So, a high response time will translate into a high bounce rate.

A high bounce rate doesn’t just reflect a negative user experience; it is also a negative SEO ranking factor. Of course, page load speed is already an important SEO ranking factor, which is why Google has its own PageSpeed Insights.

So, reducing server response time is important for three key reasons:

Better experience for your visitors.
Lower bounce rate.
Better SEO performance.

What factors affect server response time and load speed?

First, what is a good response time for your website? How fast is the optimal server response time? According to Google, a website has a good response time when the TTFB is under 200 milliseconds. So:

If your server response time is under 100ms, it’s excellent.
Between 100ms and 200 ms is considered good.
Between 200ms and 1 second is considered acceptable, but should be improved.
Above 1 second is too slow. You may need to reduce server response times.

You can use various tools to check your current server response time, but Google Pagespeed Insights is typically adequate. If your current response time is above 200ms, then here are some important factors that might be the culprit:

Hosting Service: In many cases, a high server response time is caused by a bad web hosting provider, especially if you are using shared instead of dedicated hosting.
Configurations: Your hosting service and/or server settings might not be properly optimized.
Resources: If your website has a lot of pages, images, plugins, extensions, and apps, and they aren’t structured well, they will significantly slow down your website.
Caching: Proper caching allows the web browser to pull up assets from the local cache instead of making a new request to the server every single time. Optimal caching can significantly improve the page’s load speed even if it won’t directly reduce server response time.
Website Traffic: As a general rule of thumb, when more visitors make requests on your website than your server’s capacity, it will slow down the server response time. In such cases, visitors might not be able to access your website at all.

How to Reduce Server Response Time

1. Make sure you are using a proper hosting service

Above, we discussed how your hosting service might be the culprit for your high server response time, so ensuring that you are using a reputable and optimal hosting provider is important.

Ideally, you should opt for a dedicated hosting service, but these can be cost prohibitive. There are, however, shared hosting services that are properly optimized, and can be a cost-effective choice for smaller websites.

When choosing between different hosting provider packages, check for online reviews and recommendations for providers that can maintain a fast server response time that is also stable.

If you do have the budget, then using a dedicated server is recommended, and it can significantly speed up server response time.

Other factors related to your hosting provider that you can control include:

Optimal Caching: If your site is WordPress-based, then you can use a caching plugin for this purpose. If not, there are also various third-party caching tools you can try.
Reduce PHP Scripts: PHP scripts are often used in many different elements on your website from themes, plugins, and others. Reduce them unless they are absolutely necessary. Also, make sure your site is running the most up-to-date version of PHP.
CDN: Using a CDN (content delivery network) service can also be a great way to help improve your page speed if you are currently using a shared hosting service with a sub-optimal response time.

2. Invest in a good bot management solution

Around half of the world’s total web traffic comes from bots. If there are more requests being made than your server is capable of handling, it will translate into a slower response time.

Using a bot management solution like DataDome can help manage this bot traffic and can help reduce your server response time in two different ways:

Ensuring Service for Legitimate Visitors: When bots crawl your website to commit malicious activities, a lot of server processing capacity might be required to accommodate their requests. When a real-time bot management solution like DataDome is in place, undesirable bot traffic gets blocked, freeing up your server’s resources and effectively reducing the response time. With this, a significant improvement in page load speed is possible, ensuring an optimal browsing speed for legitimate visitors.
Optimizing Server Bandwidth: A good bot management solution can help optimize your server’s bandwidth and save your server’s storage space. For example, if a bot requests a page with a 2MB size, and the website receives 100,000 similar requests from bots every month, it takes up 200 GB of valuable server bandwidth. Again, bloated resources can cause higher server response time.

3. Reduce bloat and resource sizes

If your site is on WordPress, make sure to choose an optimal Theme. WordPress themes can contain various JavaScript and PHP codes, and when these codes aren’t optimized, they can increase your server response time quite considerably. Again, check for reviews and check the Theme creator’s reputation before installing it.

Similarly, if you are using Plugins (or extensions/add-ons if your site isn’t WordPress-based), make sure to use optimized ones that are not bloated so they won’t slow down your server’s response time.

Additional tips regarding this:

Minify JavaScript and CSS.

For most websites, CSS commands how the website will look and perform. They can take a significant amount of storage space on the server, and the same can be said about JavaScript. Minifying is essentially compressing the unnecessary line breaks, spaces, and characters from CSS and JavaScript codes to save on the file size and improve the speed of processing these codes. Again, if you are on WordPress, there are various plugins that can help with this.

Optimize images and videos.

Most websites nowadays are rich with visual assets like images and videos. Make sure all image and video files are properly optimized and compressed before they are uploaded to your website. There are various tools that allow you to compress files in bulk, and they can significantly help in reducing file sizes and improving your server response time.

4. Optimize your database

Implementing database optimization in your CMS can be a very effective way to improve your server’s performance.

The bigger your content grows (more blog posts, more comments, etc.), the bigger your database size will be, and the slower your website will run.

Modern CMSs typically offer a fairly easy way to optimize their database. WordPress, for example, offers various plugins like WP-Optimize that allow you to perform this function easily.

5. Pre-fetching

Pre-fetching means anticipating and executing instructions before a user requests the instruction. For example, loading some content or links in advance by anticipating the user’s future requests.

Modern browsers typically allow for pre-fetching. Generally, there are three different types of pre-fetching:

Link Pre-Fetching: If there are only one or a few links on a page, and you are sure that a user will click on a specific link, then you can perform link pre-fetching. This is useful for a more stable user experience on the website, and can be applied for example for faster loading of the shopping cart page after a user has added the items.
DNS Pre-Fetching: Changing domain names into IP address forms in advance for faster loading.
Pre-Rendering: Rendering some elements or the whole page in advance

While pre-fetching is definitely effective for how to improve server response time, it requires a proper understanding of your user behavior or it will translate into a waste of resources.

6. Avoid web fonts

Web fonts or web typography have become increasingly popular on newer websites, but when they aren’t properly optimized, they can put extra strain on your server and will slow down the speed of your page rendering. This is because web fonts essentially add extra HTTP requests to outside resources.

As a general rule of thumb, only use web font styles that are absolutely necessary, and if possible only include character sets that are used on the site. But if you have to use web fonts, make sure you are using the new WOFF 2.0 formats for better compression.

7. Eliminate 404 errors.

404 errors are given to users when they are requesting a page that no longer exists. These requests still consume your server’s resources and might slow down your server when there are too many requests.

You can use various tools and plugins to detect the presence of 404 error URLs on your website, including the free and handy Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you’ve identified the 404 errors on your site, check the amount of traffic they generate. If the links don’t generate any traffic, you can leave them as they are. However, if they still generate some incoming traffic, you might want to set redirects and fix the link addresses for internal links.

However, it is recommended not to use redirects unless they are absolutely necessary. Redirects would translate into additional HTTP requests, which can slow down your site’s performance.

8. Keep everything updated

New versions of the software you’re using often bring performance enhancements. For example, the upgrade from WordPress 8.0 to WordPress 8.1 gave the people at Kinsta a 47.10% speed improvement on their website.

Similarly, if you’re using WordPress, keeping your themes and plugins updated is important because patches often include performance-enhancing features. Generally, it’s considered best practice to only keep the themes and plugins you need and delete the rest, so they don’t take up unnecessary space.

Reduce your server response time with DataDome

A typical user now expects a web page to load in less than 3 seconds, which translates into a server response time of 200ms or less. If you’re above this speed, then you’ll see a higher bounce rate on your website, which will typically translate into a loss in website traffic and revenue.

We recommend doing the following activities to reduce server response time effectively:

Check and evaluate key factors that will affect server response time and website performance in general.
Test your site’s current speed and check for potential errors.
Ensure your site’s resources are properly compressed and optimized at all times, including for plugins and Themes.
Use a proper bot management solution to protect your website from bot traffic that can significantly slow down your server response time and performance.