Check Your Domain’s TTL

Don’t fall victim to a slow website. Check your TTL here. This tool just checks for A and CNAME records, not MX or anything else. The purpose is to check and make sure TTLs aren’t set too low, which could slow down the load time for website.

This page can do a TTL check for you now on your domain. It also goes into more detail as to why a higher value on a DNS TTL makes sense in most cases.

What the DNS TTL Means (Explained)

OK, this isn’t just “some little tool” you can safely ignore. Nope. Like, nobody thinks of checking this, and it matters. Let me explain this a bit.

When someone goes to your website, a few things happen:

1. A domain lookup happens. Your browser needs to figure out where a domain is. Computers like IP addresses, so that lookup needs to happen.
2. You computer checks your ISP’s own, cached list of domains to see if they know. If they don’t have an up to date record, then it needs to to another lookup.
3. This extra lookup goes to the domain’s nameservers. Like, maybe that’s DOMAINCONTROL.COM, which is what GoDaddy uses. It goes there and gets the real record.
4. And, your ISP’s DNS is actually doing the lookup, so your browser is just waiting. Nothing is happening. It gets the record, then hands it off to your computer, then your computer goes to that IP address. When your local ISP gets that record, there’s a time attached to how long that record is good for before it needs to get another. We’ll get to this in a second.
5. Then, your computer goes the IP address that’s listed (the “A” records in your site’s DNS) and asks that server for your website. It then starts getting delivered.

OK, back to that time limit on that DNS record. That’s called the TTL or time to live. Here’s where this gets important.

If that record is good for a day or a week even, then the chance that the additional lookup needs to happen goes way down. But, if that record can only be good for a few hours, one hour, 10 minutes, or 5 minutes, then that additional lookup has to be done all the time. That slows things down.

So, you want a high TTL on your “A” records in your DNS unless you’re planning to move your website to another server… which hardly ever happens.

This, a low TTL (less than a day) is slowing down the lookup of your website, which makes your website load more slowly. Now is your chance to fix it. Do the lookup, see what it is, and if it’s too low, ask your website team about upping the value of the TTL. You’re welcome – a speed increase with one, simple change. Do not ignore this.