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A client of mine which I will be completely re-building the site for, is having some major speed issues with the current site. It takes on average 4.4 to 4.8 seconds before the First Byte Time to clear (I believe this is correct). Absolutely nothing is loaded until this time is complete first.

The server it's on now seems ok, but for a test I had the site copied to my own server too and checked the site by changing my hosts file and the exact same issue is occurring, no matter what, you have to wait a minimum of 4.4 seconds.

The quality of the site is not great such as too many JS calls etc, but is there anything in particular in regards to this FBT (First Byte Time) to look into first?

Site: /

wharfdale
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First byte time typically represents the time it takes for the request to arrive, to be processed by whatever application is handling it, a response to be formulated and then sent back.

Basically, the lions share of the amount of time it takes.

The lastbyte time - first byte time in general is giving you a measure of throughput, the send request time - the first byte time gives you a narrow enough measure of how efficiently the request is processed.

You need to focus your efforts on the period of time taken to process the request on the server once it arrives.

Matthew Ife
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Matthew has some good points, but another common mistake in page designs is attempting to render and send the entire page - even content in collapsed iframes, scripts that aren't called in 99% of cases, etc - before any of the page is rendered for the user.

Ideally you only want what you actually need to cross the wire for the page to initially load to be pulled down first and the remaining content to back fill other areas to pulled down as requested (needed).

Tim Brigham
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