I use Duplicator Pro to push changes from DEV (my laptop) to STAGING (no Git or shell scripting). The site speed /page load time on DEV is at around 7 seconds after I did a bunch of disabling of certain unused Elementor elements. ***Caching, minification, etc. are planned for the future***, but I’m trying to determine first where the current bottleneck on STAGING, which is on IONOS, is.
Yes, I got plenty of confirmation that IONOS is not the best host in many ways. But, ***I don’t want to falsely attribute to them something that is not their fault.***
This is relatively generic question, but in case you want to inspect my use case, here is the staging URL: [https://elijahlisttv.org/])
Also, I’ve installed WP Server Stats plugin and Query Monitor, but I couldn’t find any large queries with QM.
## MY QUESTION:
So, my question is this:
**Q1:** **How can I find out what is the cause, chain of events that is creating the large TTFB? Is there a way I can view the components breakdown of the green bar?**
**Q2:** **Same question for the content download — Is that just fonts, or how can I know the breakdown of the blue bar?**
Metrics below. Thanks for any help.
## MY RESULTS METRICS:
I ran a Network record in Chrome dev tools and here are the results:
## DEV: Homepage
* document Waterfall: 6.55s
* Waiting for server response: 1.50s
* Content Download: 5.05s
## DEV: Blank Page Test
* document Waterfall: 3.38s
* Waiting for server response: 1.51s
* Content Download: 1.87s
​
[\\”Document\\” type row waterfall timing breakdown for DEV Blank Page Test])​
## STAGING: Homepage
* document Waterfall: 8.19s
* Waiting for server response: 6.49s
* Content Download: 1.12s
* [https://imgur.com/Z1mvbiE])
## STAGING: Blank Page Test
* document Waterfall: 4.86s
* Waiting for server response: 4.48s
* Content Download: 381.02 ms
* [https://imgur.com/ijXOTzx])
​
[\\”Document\\” type row waterfall timing breakdown for STAGING Blank Page Test])##
## MY SYSTEM:
* Wampserver 3
* Windows 10
* WordPress with Elementor Pro on Astra Theme
## LINKS CONSULTED:
* [https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/network/reference/?utm\_source=devtools#timing-explanation])
* [https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/zhrx41/waiting\_for\_server\_response\_is\_taking\_too\_much/])
* [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/wtf4gy/google\_chrome\_waterfall\_not\_working\_need\_help/])
1. Everything happening serverside attributes to TTFB, either manually step through code to check for optimizations (not likely with Elementor), or use something like Query monitor to analyze queries:
1. [https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/])
2. Whether it’s fixable, depends on how much you can customize Elementor, codewise.
2. That’s just the site in pure text form, so unless you encoded and inlined every asset, no font or style is loaded here.
1. Slow ttfb and download is typically the result of a slow server
Switch your host.
Highly recommend WPengine. I,ve always had good results with them and not using a bloated theme/builder, and avoiding excess plugins. Elementor is pretty bloated but swapping to a better host will help the TTFB.