How can I reduce server response time on my ecommerce site?

[wingnutz]

Reduce initial server response time

0.59 s

This is the biggest issue we are seeing after having spent some months redesigning the pages around speed.

Anyone else seeing this issue?  This - to me - looks like a shopify issue. 

- mike

[oreoorbitz]

Maaaaybe.

What size is your HTML file?

How much complex liquid operations do you have on the page your testing?

I've seen themes with dozens upon dozens of {% includes %} and a for loo inside a for loop inside a for loop, which resulted in about 500ms - 1s of delay in serving the HTML

[wingnutz]

Thank you for the note, oreoorbitz .

Not likely HTML size.  But could be something we are doing.  Have not eliminated that yet.

https://www.networktigers.com

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.networktigers.com%2Fpr...

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Reduce initial server response time

1.01 s

Keep the server response time for the main document short because all other requests depend on it. 

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Although we did not use this tool in rebuilding the pages, found it interesting:
https://analyze.speedboostr.com/result/fzzzf0ht3b

We are getting down to the core of what makes Shopify, Shopify.  I am wondering if anyone else is seeing this server response issue.

NOTE:  we are seeing better responses and number on the second evaluation of the page.  Which means Shopify is doing some caching in some way.  Fastly?  As shopify got hit on the 8 june outage.

- mike

[eStoreSpeed]

Hi @wingnutz,

Page speed insights is an unreliable tool in general so try  to run the test at least 9 times and take the average server response time score. That will give you a much better indicator of server response time.

There isn't much you can do about improving the server response time though.

Best,

eStoreSpeedOptimization

[wingnutz]

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, the speed results vary.  But they do improve from the first which indicates caching of some sort somewhere in the process.

We are finding the Google Search Console reading to be most similar to the first response from Page speed insights. That is worrisome as that means all of us are subject to a result without caching.  If one were to use your technique of taking the average, then you are jaundicing the results as Google appears to use the first result rather than the average.  The average tells you what your speed is after the shopify server (not sure on this) has cached it.

Hence the conundrum we face:  where and how is Shopify caching the result?  While we - us store managers - work on speed, what is shopify doing?

- mike

[wingnutz]

Due to the dearth of replies, my only guess is that Shopify may not be addressing the Core Vitals issue at the server level.

If anyone knows differently, please let us know.

Also, has shopify contacted all their third party application programmers and let them know how critical the speed issue is?  I spent alot of time talking to app developers over the last four months.  Those that were addressing speed issues we kept the app.  those that were slowing us down got removed from our site.  

- mike

[oreoorbitz]

PSI doesn't keep file cache, like images and scripts, but I guess it keeps DNS and other network info cache, so the second time will skip dns look up and all that stuff, so that might be the reason the second time you run PSI it's faster. Why the specific delay, I'm not sure, it seems you fixed the issue becuase I don't see a slow server response time on PSI for your site.

[wingnutz]

Thanks.  

Most speed issues resolved.  That said, we are still making more changes.

Shopify hosts at Amazon. Not sure how the whole DNS / Arp caching mechanism works there.  But there are some real server response delays with Amazon / Shopify.  Someone should be working it.  Would like to see their data and if anyone is looking at this issue.

[Shevek]

Did you solve the issue? It seems that your images load quite fast, while we have server response times of up to 1.5s for image loading from shopify's CDN, which is really too long. What did you do to improve it?