How to improve long wait time or time to first byte wordpress

Hello, are there any experts out there that can shed some light on the long wait times that occur when trying to load my website? Average in the uk (where the site is hosted is around 3.5 seconds and there is a gtmetrix test link below showing 3.7 from the USA.

Any suggestions or ideas would be much appreciated

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.giftswithstyle.com/6sioC3bO
https://www.giftswithstyle.com/

 

You could do a couple of things to speed up your site, but we won't know what the problem is because we don't know what you have installed.

• I recommend, first and foremost, getting yourself on CloudFlare (it's free). cloudflare.com
• Install a profiler. I recommend https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/ for ease-of-use. This will tell you what is taking a lot of time to load.
• Use Google Developer tools (network tab) to see what scripts are taking the longest to load
• Get yourself a caching plugin, play around with the settings until you're happy with the speed.
• If your server supports Redis, or you can install Redis, try this cache plugin: en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/redis-cache
• Try using a HTTP accelerator, like Varnish, if your server allows or it's a dedicated server and you can install it yourself.
• Ensure your PHP version is up-to-date, are you running the latest PHP? Can you? If so, get yourself PHP7, it's much faster.

Those are some tips to increase the speed of your WordPress site!

 

Caching is what you should go with, it will improve your speed a lot.

 

The OP's site is on Cloudflare now and load times are still terrible. First load took about 15 seconds before the index page started to appear. A second load took 37 seconds for all the 128 - 132 file requests to be loaded. However, subsequent page loads were fast.

Were the first and second loads fetched by Cloudflare from the web host's server and subsequent loads cached by Cloudflare?

I tried looking for the IP history of giftswithstyle.com and it appears to have been on Cloudflare for some time now. Perhaps some loads depend on the speediness of the web server the site is hosted on.

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dMDgXV/https://www.giftswithstyle.com/

 

Caching will not result good if you don't have your site optimized and also if you don't have good server / hosting.

Please optimize your site, get SSD VPS / hosting and tweak things then enable cloudflare.

 

Hello, when I used wordpress years ago I got very good results doing this:

• Don't use any panel, just configure your server through command line.
• Use Nginx instead of Apache, and test several tuning option, put the cache directory in RAM (for example, mfs).
  
• Configure all caches for PHP-FPM.
• Use redis.io with this plugin (it's only a few lines): https://nl.wordpress.org/plugins/redis-cache/
• Avoid the use of plugins.
• Choose a provider with top notch network speed and low latency.

Maybe I miss something. The idea is to set all kind of caches (outside wordpress) and use RAM filesystem whenever you can.