WordPress Site Health showed no critical issues, but the site was noticeably slow to load. Chrome DevTools Network showed the document request itself taking several seconds — one capture showed a Time to First Byte (TTFB) of roughly 2.3 seconds against a 2.7-second total request time. Because Site Health was green, it was tempting to assume the server was healthy, and then to start hunting for heavy images or scripts to explain the slowness.
⚡ Quick Fix (TL;DR)
The Culprit: Site Health is a point-in-time diagnostic snapshot, not a continuous performance monitor — a site can pass its checks while a live request experiences slow server response or other transient conditions. And when TTFB accounts for most of the total request time, the bottleneck is how long the server took to start responding, not what the browser downloaded afterward — pointing at server-side processing, PHP, database queries, or caching, not image weight.
The Fix: The investigation was redirected from asset optimization to server-side response time, based on what the actual live request measured rather than what the snapshot check reported.
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