I have been trying to optimize my core web vitals for my website bootstrapcreative.com and was constantly running into low scores. My website traffic receives visits from all over the world with the majority from India and the United States. When I would test my site on my computer the speed scores looked great. But then Google Search Console was still reporting slow loading because it was calculating using field data. Or basically data collected from all visitors around the world. So I needed to optimize the load times for Europe and Asia.
So I began down a new rabbit hole of finding ways to optimize this and noticed my initial load times were really slow especially for the TTFB. This was because when someone in India requested my website it was downloading files from a server in Europe or USA and not in Asia. This caused the loading times to be slow. I setup the free Cloudflare CDN cache and tested again but was still running into the same issue. This is when I came across some of the paid features like WordPress APO and Argo routing. I decided to purchase these and see if they could fix my problem.
I reran my tests to check time to first byte and noticed a considerable difference. So if you are trying to optimize a WordPress website that attracts traffic globally, I highly recommend you trying out the following optimizations.
Steps I Took to Optimize TTFB for a Better Core Web Vital Score from Global Traffic
- Optimize your Time to First Byte or TTFB. I found this tool extremely helpful in checking the time for various locations around the world.
- Setup Cloudflare to improve page cache on a global CDN
- Purchase and install Cloudflare APO plugin
- Purchase and enable Cloudflare Argo
- Purchase and enable Cloudflare Argo Tiered Cache (I made the mistake of just enabling Argo and not turning on the tiered cache. This is needed for it work properly)
For more information on this topic read this article on reducing response time.
