As your site traffic increases, you’ll want to ensure that things continue to run smoothly. If visitors have to wait more than a few seconds for your page to load, they’ll likely leave your site and may never come back.

Fortunately, there are some simple tests to evaluate your performance and, if improvements are needed, there are solutions that can almost immediately improve your loading times. 

In this post, we’ll discuss one aspect of site performance: First Input Delay. You’ll learn what it is, why it’s important, and how you can measure and improve the FID score on your WordPress site.

Measuring a website’s user experience (UX) can be a tough challenge. But that’s what Google’s attempting to do with the Core Web Vitals metrics. And scoring well on these is important because Google weighs user experience when determining search engine rankings. 

There are several metrics that are part of Core Web Vitals, and they could sound a bit intimidating. The good news is that there are several tools that make it easier to understand your score and how to improve. 

In this article, we’ll look at one particular metric: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). This measures how long it takes your website to show the largest element that you see on the screen. 

We’ll discuss how it impacts the user experience and what causes a poor LCP score. Then, we’ll show you how to improve it.

One of the hallmarks of a user-friendly website is that it doesn’t keep visitors waiting too long while loading. Caching static assets is a critical step to improving site performance, but it doesn’t help much to simply set this up and move on. Without an efficient WordPress caching policy, you might struggle to provide fast loading times.

Fortunately, learning how to leverage browser caching on WordPress is easier than you might think. You can configure browser caching manually, and the Content Management System (CMS) also enables you to use tools that do it for you.

In this article, we’ll explain how browser caching works and discuss its benefits. We’ll also show you how to check if caching is enabled on your site and look at different ways to turn it on. 

Time to First Byte (TTFB) and server response times are metrics that directly correspond to your website’s perceived speed and overall performance. Optimizing your site to minimize these times can help improve Core Web Vitals scores and, consequently, edge out stiff competition for search engine ranking positions. This also helps you provide the best possible user experience for your site visitors.

Working on these metrics might sound complicated, but there are plenty of ways even beginners can reduce TTFB and server response times on WordPress. For instance, you can install optimization plugins, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), or migrate to a faster web host.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at TTFB and why it’s important. Then, we’ll discuss six ways to reduce your TTFB and server response times.