Thursday, July 23, 2015

First Byte Time “FBT” www.webpagetest.org

First and foremost I hope this helps some others, I find it very important to share knowledge that will help others to improve their Web sites on the Internet.

I have been scratching my head trying to figure out why I was receiving an “F” rating on www.webpagetest.org for First Byte Time “FBT”.  After some research and additional testing on www.shoeshow.com I have come to the following conclusions:

Reasons why First Byte Time takes so long
  1. Number of requests/responses needed to build the page
  2. Does the page have a lot of Dynamic content on the page (aka how many database calls are going back and forth for data)
  3. Size of the overall page
  4. Size of CPU and MEMORY of the HOSTING SERVER. The more powerful the SERVER the faster processing you will receive. 
  5. Do you have a VM Server or a Dedicated Server

My test sample was for the home page of www.shoeshow.com I got an “F” for FBT every time, that is because this page has a lot of dynamic content and unless I dissect and rebuild this page it will continue to receive an “F” although the overall page is loading in under 2 sec.  However, If I go to https://www.shoeshow.com/reward-points it gets a “B” because there is very little dynamic or programming on that page and not many images.  Finally when I run our https://www.shoeshow.com/404.aspx we get an “A” because there is no images and no coding.


My overall opinion is that FBT is important, but can also be a false/positive.  

And Finally --- Utilize a CDN if you want a fast responsive Web site.  I cannot believe the overall performance of using a CDN ---  Yes I will plug https://www.akamai.com/ 

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