One of the most important performance metrics for a WordPress website is Server Response Time, commonly measured as Time to First Byte (TTFB). While caching plugins like WP Rocket significantly improve performance, many server configurations still route every request through PHP before serving the cached page.
In reality, cached HTML files can be delivered directly by the web server (Apache or Nginx), completely bypassing PHP and WordPress. This approach reduces CPU usage, lowers the PHP-FPM workload, and improves overall server response time.
This guide explains how to optimize both Apache (.htaccess) and Nginx so they can serve WP Rocket's static HTML cache directly.
Why Is This Optimization Important?
By default, a typical WordPress request follows this flow:
