How To Reduce Initial Server Response Time

There are many factors that contribute to the success of an ecommerce website, including immersive media, savvy email marketing, smart omnichannel strategies, and timely promotions. But even the most sophisticated retailers can have their conversion rates and bottom lines dragged down by slow site performance. 

That’s why it is critical to optimize your ecommerce site at every level of your tech stack, including improving your initial server response time. According to Shopify research on data from Google, reducing your site speed by just a half second can have a significant impact on conversion, as well as the entire customer experience. 

Reliably fast site speeds also ensure brand visibility through improved SEO rankings. A fast server response time is a key part of making sure Google gives your site the rankings you need to attract new customers.

In this article, we’ll dive into server response times, what they impact in ecommerce, and key strategies for keeping them as low as possible.

What is server response time?

Every ecommerce website is hosted on a server—or with more complex architectures, across multiple servers. Server response time is the number of milliseconds it takes for a user to send a request to a web server and that server to process the request and send a response back.

Once a user types your URL into a browser, or clicks on a search link to go to your site, it’s crucial that the server responds nearly instantaneously, or you risk them bouncing and never coming back.

One specific metric for server response time is time to first byte (TTFB). Time to first byte is the time it takes for the user to receive the first byte of data from the server after they’ve made a request. Having a good TTFB score is critical—it indicates that something is happening in response to their request, so they don’t perceive your site as slow or laggy.

Why should retailers reduce their server response time?

A fast server response time is key to facilitating fast, seamless transactions on your website. In a consumer survey by Unbounce, 45% said that having an ecommerce site load slower than expected made them less likely to make a purchase.

You also can’t sell anything to someone who doesn’t stay on your site long enough to buy. The probability of a potential customer bouncing increases 32% as page load time goes from one to three seconds.

Google’s search algorithm prioritizes websites with what they call a good “page experience.” Server response time, as part of the overall TTFB score, is the core foundation for Google’s page experience metrics. A TTFB score is considered “good” by Google if it is 800 milliseconds or less for at least 75% of your users.

At Shopify, we recently looked at the Core Web vitals of over 200,000 stores. The average Shopify site had a Time to First Byte (TTFB) of 0.51 seconds. The average TTFB for stores on other ecommerce platforms was 1.4 seconds, with the slowest at 1.99 seconds.

A key factor in providing a good page experience is improving your Core Web Vitals score. Improving your Core Web Vitals involves fast loading times, which is heavily influenced by your TTFB. The more you optimize your site speed, the higher your engagement, retention, and conversions will be.

What factors impact server response time and speed? 

Much of what makes modern ecommerce shopping experiences so sophisticated is also what can slow them down. It takes a lot of resources to power websites that meet the rapidly evolving expectations of modern consumers. 

Some of the factors that can weigh heavily on servers and processing time include:

Personalized shopping experiences

Offering personalized product suggestions, customized recommendations, and targeted promotions are built with real-time data processing, numerous database calls, and complex algorithms. All of this requires the hosting servers and networks to dynamically create a tailored experience for each customer.

Social media integrations

Displaying real-time updates and user-generated content from social channels requires multiple integrations and calls to third-party platforms and providers. Enabling social media interactions directly from your site requires significant resources to create a seamless experience for your customers.

Advanced search and filtering

If you have a large product catalog, enabling real-time filtering and advanced search capabilities can be very resource-intensive. Buyers want to find and browse products quickly and easily, and running algorithms and displaying numerous results requires a lot of processing and database calls.

These features are by no means everything on modern ecommerce websites that can impact performance. The more robust the buying experience you provide, the more you are asking of your networks and infrastructure.

There are several other issues at the lower levels of your ecommerce tech stack that can cause a slow server response time. These can include:

Underpowered or overloaded servers

Not having enough physical resources on your hosting servers, including RAM, CPU, or storage, can lead to slow response times. Some providers overprovision their shared hosting environments, leading to performance issues when demand spikes.

Inefficient code

If your website uses headless architectures, especially microservices, in your builds, codebases can easily sprawl. This can lead to excessive calls to resources that aren’t required, requests for functions that are no longer needed, and more—all loading down your servers and connections while slowing the site performance.

Excessive HTTP requests

If your codebase calls too many external scripts (including non-optimized CSS and javascript files) it’s easy to end up with excessive HTTP requests on your site. Every HTTP request means your website must request and receive data back, so you want to make sure you only request what is absolutely necessary.

High latency

Modern ecommerce sites rely on numerous calls to distributed resources, and each of those calls go across a network. Without optimized connectivity and codebases, it’s easy to end up with high latency and network slowdowns. The more calls to third-party resources hosted on other platforms you have, the greater the chances of issues with latency. When thinking about latency versus response time, latency is the time it takes for data to move across a network, so calculating response time includes both latency and the time it takes to process the request on the server.

How can you reduce server response times?

Reducing server response time for an ecommerce site can be challenging without the right access to infrastructure and technical skills. However, some ways to improve your server response can be fairly straightforward. Let’s review some actionable steps you can take, from reasonably simple to more technically advanced.

Choose the right ecommerce platform

Many of the issues that affect server response times are at the infrastructure and network level, so finding the right platform provider is critical. Not every ecommerce platform puts the time, effort, and resources to make their stores fast. In many ways, the easiest and most effective way to address slow server response times is to find a provider like Shopify that provides dedicated, distributed, and optimized resources to host your store.

Implement a content delivery network (CDN)

Another way for retailers to improve their server response time is to use a CDN. When your servers are physically far from your customers, data has further to travel and response times are slowed. CDNs have distributed servers around the world that store your static content, including images, text, and video so it can be accessed more quickly by your customers. While you can build and create your own CDN, it’s much easier to work with a provider like Cloudflare, or a platform like Shopify that already uses a CDN to speed up every store.

Optimize your databases and applications

Displaying products, retrieving customer data, processing sales, and other key ecommerce functions all require making numerous calls to your database. That’s why it is critical to optimize your databases to eliminate redundant data, index frequently searched columns, and partition large tables. You’ll also want to streamline the code that is accessing your databases to optimize each interaction and remove any unnecessary code or logic. 

Enable advanced caching

Caching allows your website to store static resources like images, scripts, and CSS files locally in web browsers. Enabling browser caching on your site will allow repeat visitors to have a faster response time. You can also enable server-side caching in your database or by using a CDN (see above) to serve static assets faster and speed up response times for all visitors.

Optimize content and reduce bloat

To keep your ecommerce site fast, you should actively minimize the size of your images and videos through compression and optimization. You can also minify CSS and JavaScript files so they can be transferred faster. Make sure you also regularly review and optimize new content as it is added to your site.

Update to the latest web technologies

If your ecommerce site has been around for several years, you may not be fully up to date on the latest web technologies. Protocols, frameworks, and libraries are continually being updated and optimized to be more efficient, more reliable, and more secure. You should regularly review and update your codebase and infrastructure to use the latest technologies, such as HTTP/3.

Actively monitor and maintain server performance

Ecommerce websites and tech stacks are continually evolving, so it is important to monitor your website and server performance. You should regularly review your site’s performance with Google’s PageSpeed Insights, as well as implement monitoring tools on your servers to alert you to performance issues, anomalies, bottlenecks, and more. You can even consider regularly load testing your infrastructure to ensure performance during peak traffic times. This allows you to proactively address performance issues before a customer or your business is impacted by slow response times.

Top tools to reduce server response time

There are several categories of tools that can help you reduce server response time. We’ll review the primary functions of each category, and some examples of tools and providers you can work with.

Page speed tests

To regularly review your website’s performance, including server response time, you can use browser-based comprehensive speed tests like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, Solarwinds’ Pingdom, and GTmetrix. They each provide you reports on your overall performance, including TTFB, and recommended actions you can take to improve load times. 

User experience testing

Similar to the page speed tests, user experience tools simulate user interactions from different devices from different locations on your website. Catchpoint’s Web Page Test and Chrome’s User Experience (CrUX) dashboard both provide data on TTFB and other performance metrics to help you see what improvements are needed.

Observability and application performance monitoring (APM)

For a closer, more granular look at your entire tech stack’s performance, you can invest in an observability platform with application monitoring tools, such as Dynatrace, New Relic, and Cisco's AppDynamics. These tools provide real-time data on system behavior, allowing you to locate and identify performance issues quickly. They also monitor your application performance so you can find and resolve potential bottlenecks and slowdowns in the lower levels of your tech stack. 

Platform and dashboard reporting

Modern ecommerce platforms like Shopify offer performance dashboards and built-in reporting on Google’s Core Web Vitals and other metrics. If you build your store on a platform like Shopify, you can regularly review these reports and analyze performance to make continual improvements.

How to continually improve your server response times

To keep up with today’s high-demand consumer, most retailers will need to continually update and improve their ecommerce sites. But with every new upgrade, feature, or product added, there is a potential impact to site performance. Staying ahead of potential issues requires a proactive approach and a regular cadence of monitoring, upgrades, and maintenance.

A good continuous improvement plan to keep server response times low should include:

• Regularly upgrading the infrastructure and applications at the bottom of your tech stack, including server hardware, network connectivity, and software.
• Keeping up to date on the latest advancements in technology across your ecommerce tech stack, including new code frameworks, network protocols, and server operating systems and software.
• Creating KPIs for performances and monitoring performance to make sure performance stays high and response rates stay low. You should plan to use several tools to proactively identify and address issues as changes to the site are rolled out.
• Periodically gather feedback from your customers through analytics, surveys, portals, and support challenges. This helps you not only identify detailed issues with performance, but also identify what is most important to your customers so you can prioritize accordingly. 

Partner with a provider that delivers fast server response times

Keeping server response rates fast while offering a modern, robust buying experience is a tough balancing act for most retailers. Most of the issues that impact your server response time lie at the bottom of the tech stack—where you need high levels of access and technical skill to successfully improve.

An easier path to low server response times is to partner with a platform like Shopify that is committed to hosting the fastest stores in the world. When you build your website on Shopify, you gain access to the fastest server speed in commerce—2.8 times faster on average than other major platforms. 

This includes a very fast initial server response time. The average Shopify store has a TTFB of 0.51 seconds, a full 0.3 seconds less than what Google considers a good score: 0.8 seconds. This lets you eliminate much of the work of reducing server response and refocus your technical resources on innovation. With Shopify, you also get built-in access to performance dashboards without having to invest in expensive monitoring tools. 

For carpet retailer Ruggable the results were clear after migrating to Shopify. Their average customer visits the site multiple times before purchase, and they needed to be sure the site was fast and reliable for each visit. The improved site speed from Shopify’s infrastructure also impacted their SEO and overall visibility, directly boosting their bottom line. 

“The site is so much faster for our customers, leading to conversion and SEO boosts. Google sees our website as being much faster now and is sending a lot more traffic to us, which is fantastic,” reflected Daniel Graupensperger, director of product management at Ruggable.

If you’re curious about your site’s performance, you can get a free site speed analysis to see how you stack up against benchmarks—and your competition.