Server response time

What is server response time ?

The server response time (SRT) corresponds to the time that the WEB server takes to render a page, between the moment it receives the request and the moment it starts to send the page content. This time does not depend on the quality of the connection or the geographical location of the server (latency), but depends only on the computing performance of the WEB server.

Why should this time be short ?

The server response time can greatly affect the position of a site in search results, either because Google judges that the site is too slow to be proposed, or because users do not have the patience to wait for the page to load.

How can it be improved

It is recommended that the server returns the page in less than 300ms.

There are several solutions to improve the server response time :

• choose a more efficient server
• look for application/server-side scripts that slow down the loading of pages (or certain Wordpress modules, for example, by disabling them one after the other)
• enable server-side cache of HTML pages when possible
• use Load Balancing to reduce server load by spreading it across multiple servers.
• there are many techniques to improve server speed, but they all depend on technical constraints and should be studied with a specialized technician

Access Google's server response time documentation for more information.