There are a ton of different optimizations you can make when it comes to WordPress, and some are more important than others. One factor that is often overlooked is the lookup times associated with DNS, and the huge impact they have on your site. As with TTFB latency and network latency , it is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to calculating total page load times. So today we are going to dive into some recommendations WordPress Administration on how to reduce DNS lookups and speed them up , and how it impacts the performance of your WordPress site.
What Is DNS Lookup?
To show you what a DNS lookup is, you first need to understand how DNS works. DNS (Domain Name System) is essentially the backbone of the internet. A common reference to explain how DNS works is to think of it as a phone book for the world wide web . Every website and domain you visit is assigned an IP address .
When you type Google.com into the address bar, a DNS query is made to your ISP to request the name servers associated with the domain. The lebanon email list IP address assignment is done behind the scenes with the server that allows you to use the domain name to access it. Without DNS you would have to type something like 216.58.217.206 to reach Google. Wouldn’t that be fun?!
When you visit a website, a DNS lookup has to be done for every domain that is requested before anything is downloaded. However, a DNS WordPress Administration lookup does not have to be done on every resource. So, for example, let’s say we have the following HTTP requests :
DNS Lookups in Pingdom
Below is how the above requests appear in the Pingdom speed test tool. DNS is represented as the pink bar and is measured in ms. The first time you run your website through Pingdom, it performs a fresh look, and has to query the DNS record for each domain to get the IP information. Notice that it does not have to query DNS multiple times on the cdn.wpdev.ink domain. That is just how DNS works. It only has to query a domain once. So there are a total of 8 requests below, but only 3 DNS lookups.
These DNS lookups result in additional load it is important to create a list of stop words time, due to the fact that nothing can load until the DNS lookups are finished. Notice below that the DNS lookup on the CDN URL took over 300ms. And that doesn’t include the lookups on wpdev.ink or js.stripe.com. So you can see how this can add up over time.
When you run your website through Pingdom more than once, it caches the DNS because it already knows the IP information and doesn’t have to perform the lookup again. This is why your website appears faster after running it through belgium numbers Pingdom multiple times. As you can see in the screenshot below, in the second test, the DNS lookup time on the CDN URL is 0 ms. This is an area that many people misunderstand. But don’t worry, we’ll dig deeper into the DNS cache below.
DNS Lookups in GTmetrix
Each website speed test tool works a little differently, but almost all of them calculate DNS lookup times for you. Below is how the same requests appear in GTmetrix . DNS is represented as the green bar and measured in ms.
