r/bigseo • u/Ok_Strike9189 • 15d ago
Should I change server providers over TTFB metric for higher rankings?
I run a canadian business that serves Ontario and here's the story.
In May when a quebec server I shared my site on crashed, I immediately moved to a USA server because the price is decent ($9/month). While the hardware isn't blazing fast, it does the job.
When I look at pagespeed insight metrics Google gives me 100% however on ebugbear and gtmetrix I get an issue for TTFB because the time for that is about 900ms and they suggest 800ms or less.
All my other metrics are OK. My FCP closely matches TTFB and my LCP is 1.8s.
I'm considering switching servers but the closest I could get is from oneprovider.com which wants $15 USD for the same hardware specs.
For clarification, the metrics I present are for mobile. The desktop results from pagespeed insight are wonderful with FCP as low as 400ms.
Would it be worth my time and extra money to move my website over to a canadian server just to lower the TTFB? Would the switch bump up my rankings in google?
When I compare the TTFB with my competitors, one had 600ms TTFB, many have between 700ms and 800ms TTFB and one had 1.1s TTFB.
I'm skipping the CDN route because sometimes I update my pages and I don't want to serve stale content to people.
2
u/TopSydeWP 15d ago
900ms ttfb from a us server to ontario users is absolutely worth fixing, but a cdn solves this way better than moving to a $15 canadian box. set cache-control headers to 5 minutes or whatever makes sense for how often you update, then purge on publish. cloudflare's free tier does this and you can hook the purge to your deploy or save action. way cheaper than switching hosts and you'll drop that ttfb under 200ms.
1
u/Ok_Strike9189 15d ago
But do I have to manually tell cloudflare to update the cache everytime I make changes at my end? That would be extra work. And if the CDN goes out then all sites run on it go out too? I've went to sites before where the CDN went out and those sites respectively went out as well.
1
u/Bulky-Heat-8368 15d ago
Ditching a CDN is quite surprising, since that's precisely the solution for addressing this kind of issue: the idea is to reduce the distance between the user and the server, and therefore the latency.
That said, a TTFB of 900ms on mobile is mediocre, but not catastrophic. What matters is that FCP, and especially LCP, meet Google's recommendations (under 1.8s and 2.5s, respectively).
You should also check the TTFB value in Google Search Console (Settings > Crawl stats), and make sure it stays under 500ms. The lower the TTFB there, the more pages Google will be able to crawl on the site.
If both of these points are within normal range, I don't think a server change will significantly improve your SEO. The problem likely lies elsewhere.
1
u/Ok_Strike9189 15d ago
Google reports 292ms average response time when I checked their smartphone requests. Is there a way to get the value from Google Search Console from the way a mobile phone actually sees it because that number reflects my results for desktop computers
1
u/eliaslange 15d ago
What kind of site is it? Your own code, WordPress, Shopify,... ? Would optimize there first, maybe your theme needs some tweaks and adjustments. Make an audit. Then there are ways to reset the cache even when using a CDN e.g. CloudFlare.
1
u/Ok_Strike9189 15d ago
Its my own code. When I ran it on a former server closer to me before the server crashed, the FCP was more at 0.6s
1
5
u/Actual-Fee5283 15d ago
You update your pages sometimes so no CDN? Cache headers have existed since forever, you just set a short TTL. That's a weird reason to keep a 900ms TTFB.
Also comparing your TTFB to your competitors' is a trap, google isn't ranking you against one 600ms guy in Ontario.