Server technical information and first respond time for WordPress

Question

I made a wordpress theme, when I compare mine with another website (similar) mine is smaller Page size 1.1 MB Load time 5.05 s Requests 99

but their website is Page size 1.4 MB Requests 132 Load time 2.78 s

my question is, how server types affect load time? because mine take about 3 seconds to reply, but their 171ms.

what can I do as developer to reduce first respond time?

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/b4BQPa/http://www.healthvisionuk.com/

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/chhrS3/https://www.helpinghandshomecare.co.uk/

Answer 1

Make sure you run each Pingdom test a few times to average out results!

The two things that will most likely account for your difference in results here are :

• The power and other specification of the server - the faster site is https, so may be able to use http/2; the faster site may be compressing the pages; Is your site on a low-powered shared server? Is the faster site on a dedicated server?
• The location of the server relative to your Pingdom test location - I don't know where the 2 tested sites are located, but it will be difficult to do a decent like-for-like test if they are on different continents and the Pingdom test doesn't reflect that.