I have 2 websites, both hosted on the same server, using the same WordPress version and both are under the same Cloudflare Account with the same configuration and both are being tested from same datacenter of gtmetrix
However the TTFB for 1 is 3 time higer than the other, but both websites load under 2sec once it passed the TTFB
The transmetal site quite literally loads more things, ~200 requests vs ~160 requests prometal loads. It looks like this is in part due to Google Maps loading more, and some other assets like jet-menu. You can compare and contrast the exact resources based on the waterfalls in GTMetrix
If your website is fully static, I would enable HTML Caching via a Cache Rule or Page Rule to help with the time to first byte, TTFB really shouldn’t be in the seconds. I think in your screenshot with TTFB you just got lucky, most of the document responses I get on either take seconds.
You could also look into Cloudflare APO, Cloudflare’s (paid) solution to speed up WordPress, which gets around some potential issues that you can have by force enabling cache for your entire Wordpress site and automagically clears cache when needed:
It looks like to me your origin server is really slow overall. If it’s shared hosting, it seems overloaded and you may want to change plans/providers, or if it’s a VPS/dedicated resources, it seems overutilized. 3 seconds TTFB is crazy.
But then should this impact TTFB? By definition, the TTFB threshold should be reached long before any of these requests should even be made on either site.
Overall requests, no, but there seem to be some plugins/themes like jet-menu enabled on one that the other doesn’t have, which would impact the ttfb as it would take Wordpress longer to add/process those extra plugins/themes. There is a lot of variance as well, the gtmetrix run I linked for transmetal reported 8.6s ttfb at that time.
Your overall problem is with your origin web server (the server running Wordpress). As I linked above, you can try APO or enabling cache to reduce TTFB (and maybe reduce load enough that your ttfb is a bit better for uncached responses). But the root issue is your web server is likely on shared hosting with too many noisy neighbors, or otherwise on a machine (vps/etc) that has too few resources for the site. That, and/or your Wordpress configuration has too many plugins/etc on it which could be slowing it down as well.
Edit: You’re not the same guy, same thing applies though
