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The visitor’s device sends an initial HTTP request for the page. This is the identical starting point for both the database-backed and static/CDN architectures and triggers the subsequent load steps
WordPress queries its database to retrieve page content, theme settings, and plugin data before building the page. Each database lookup adds latency, so many queries or a cold cache increase total load time
WordPress assembles the HTML from PHP templates and active plugins at this stage. More plugins or complex themes increase render overhead, prolonging how long the server takes to produce the final HTML
For a static site, the finished HTML is prebuilt and stored on a CDN edge server near the visitor. This eliminates database and plugin processing on each request, enabling much faster delivery
This marker indicates when the main page content becomes visible to the user. On the static/CDN path it typically occurs around 0.7 seconds, whereas a cold database-backed load can take several seconds