TTFB is one of the most important performance metrics and definitely impacts page speed. This is probably the most important metric when it comes to Page Speed as well, and you must know how well (or badly) your website ranks at this to provide a good experience.

In this article, we will elaborate on the concept of TTFB, explain methods to assess it, and offer some advice that can help you lower your website's Time To First Byte. You will then have a higher page speed and, therefore, an improved LCP score.

Time To First Byte (TTFB) / Response Time

The TTFB stands for the Time To First Byte. It is a metric that calculates how long it takes for the server to respond after receiving and processing a request from users' browsers.

Loosely speaking, it is the duration between when you load a web page (e.g., by clicking on things or typing in URLs) and how much time that gets reflected/displayed on your screen.

How much time does it take for the information to reach the server being fetched by the browser, connected, and presented on the front end itself? Boot and the Time To First Byte (TTFB) in networking où pépèret.

TTFB is a mandatory web vital because it is measured first, before any other core Web Vitals such as CLS, LCP, or FID. A slow Time to the First Byte impacts all Core Web Vitals.

If you quantified TTFB together with Web Vitals, it would provide a holistic perspective of your site performance and allow you to identify areas where trouble exists in the connection to the website. It would give you a chance to figure out what is failing fast and expose more debuggability to better understand how users are experiencing your site.

This occurs in a 3-step procedure, with latency and delay everywhere in between each step, which also contributes to your total TTFB.

Make HTTP request to the server

The browser sends an HTTP request to the server every time a user visits your site. At this stage, delays can be introduced due to physical distance, slow DNS lookup, and the speed of the internet from your client side.

Server Processing Request

As soon as the request reaches you, this server needs to respond appropriately. This includes various kinds of delays, such as excessive third-party scripts, unoptimized themes or code…, and blocked unwanted server resources when it comes to memory/disk I/Outs.

Returning Responses to the User

Ultimately, the server sends a response back to the user. The server network speed and the clients' speed are both low. This is a very slow process of downloading video files and several images. If you access it from a slow internet connection and/or WiFi hotspot, your Time To First Byte will decrease.

So, to get your website's best performance and speed, you must reduce that Time To First Byte.

Why Is The TTFB Important

TTFB is so important because this metric clearly correlates to the User Experience and page loading time. So, it is important to reduce the TTFB as much as possible for users visiting our website.

If a user clicks on any link and the server takes too long to respond to that page, users will leave the website. TTFB is important to consider in terms of knowing how well the servers have been configured and whether or not each server can handle the expected influx of traffic.

This applies to how well the page rendering works within its end-user experience as well, alongside being a part of on-site search engine optimization. Along with LCP, CLS, and FCP, these are among the Web Vitals. Google receives this type of data to know how quickly your website page loads, which results in its rankings.

However, something like A Good Time To First Byte should be followed, just like the profile design data part.

According to Google, your TTFB should be under 200 ms. This number may vary depending on the types of content you have on your page.

TTFB (Time to the first byte): It should be less than 100 for static content and between 200 and 500 ms if you are catering to dynamic behavior.

500 ms is the maximum that Google and its users can tolerate. If they leave your applications and services for more than this time, Google will downgrade the website's connecting or mounting ranks.

What Leads To a Slow TTFB?

Time to first byte is affected by many variables, such as network latency, DNS response time, the high volume of web traffic, and dynamic content.

Problems may arise while sending out a request at any stage of the Life cycle and when making responses. They may happen just at the response sent back to the server.

If a visitor requests for something to happen in the server, then the Time To First Byte is measured from that moment. The problem with this approach is that the server may not receive a request instantly. A few other things can be used to determine how long it takes this specific server to receive your request.

These factors range from the time it takes to complete a DNS lookup to how close your client is to the server physically and even the speed of certain cables users might use.

Other factors that can influence the server's time to generate a response are the cache response, script execution time, and the database call.

After that, the response should come back to the user as a request traveling from the user to the server. The relationship between the server and the user really dictates how long it will take for that response to travel back.

A few other factors that incur processing a TTFB slow reading are environment setup, system resources and so on.

Unstructured Code
Resources(mostly memory and I/O) not present during peak web traffic
Server Configurations like PHP settings.
Regardless of what causes the lengthy TTFB, you must resolve it soon so as not to impact page speed and user experience.

Measuring the Time To First Byte

You can use some tools here to calculate TTFB. These each bring up a different way of showing the results. You may only use one tool as per your requirement & comfort, and you can try to test with the others

Measure Time To the First Byte using Chrome DevTools

So, if you want to measure Time To First Byte in Google Chrome, just open DevTools. The Time To First Byte will be propagated by slow internet connectivity and network latency, which becomes huge when you test on your machine. However, they observed that third-party tools can be more efficient, as tested by a data center.

If you wish to check on your local machine,
First of all, you have to open your browser and go to the Wordpress website.
Now click the three dots at the top right of your page.

Here, you need to click on the More tools option:

Now, click on the Chrome menu and choose Developers Tools.
Then right-click on an element and select inspect.
For Windows, these will be the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+I, and for Mac users, Cmd + Opt + I.
Now it is necessary to enable the network window and view how well the site performs.

Determine TTFB using WebPageTest Profile.

The more advanced WebPageTest tool allows you to test your site performance from various locations. It allows you to test from 20+ locations and emulates the device on a specific connection.

How to Check The Performance of Your Website on the WebPage Test

Open the Waterfall chart Lastly, click on the Details (screenshot below) and scroll to Waterfall view.

Click the main document, then TTFB. Show more screenshots

Where your site visitors reside: If you don't know where the people coming to your sites are, check out Google Analytics or the monitoring tool of choice for The Geo and Technology reports.

Time to First Byte (KeyCDN): KeyCDN's Web Performance tool The time taken for the first byte of your site response is a basic, standard measurement.

This tool by KeyCDN is a web performance-focused solution for measuring TTFB. It allows you to measure TTFB from 14 locations at the same time, which is the easiest way to demonstrate the effect on TTFB when distance is related to a webpage.

As you can see in the result below, here is the TTFB for WordPress. org site is greater in Australia and, as a whole, Europe + Asia, lower for the US. This is happening because the server sits in the US. This is the evidence that TTFB and distance/latency have to do a lot!

KeyCDN – TTFB

Calculate the Time To First Byte (TTFB) with PageSpeed Insights.

Google PageSpeed Insights is one of the most crucial tools for calculating the TTFB.

Step 1: Open Google PageSpeed Insights on the Chrome browser and enter a URL to the query box

Step 2: Then click Analyze and wait. Once you analyze your site, the TTFB metric report is visible to other metrics ( CLS, FCP, and LCP).

Step 3: Time to First Byte: This is how long PSI will forward the request from different worldwide locations. In particular, PSI measures TTFB specifically as the median Time to First Byte. You can use this information to detect problems due to network latency and geographical location.

Decreasing Time To First Byte

So, Now that we have explained TTFB measurement, let's move towards all the practices you can implement to reduce your site Time To First Byte (TTB)

1) Utilize a Fast Web Host

TTFB can be reduced; you only need a fast host. Take the host server location into consideration. You must select a host Close to your customers (very close).

For example, if most users are from the USA, it's obvious that you should host your site in the United States rather than Europe. Moreover, if you anticipate a large number of visitors to your website, it's important that the host easily scales the site to reduce its TTFB.

2) Content Delivery Network

Every time you change a host, it slows down the site speed, lowering your search engine rankings. When DNS servers leave the former hosting provider for the new one, the site can be offline for a couple of hours.

CDN: Using a CDN makes the website load faster, hence reducing TTFB. A CDN can spread the content of your site to various servers worldwide and decrease the physical distance between server and user.

It also reduces the network latency, and eventually, your TTFB improves. This way, you can deliver the scripts or images to users quickly by using a high-quality CDN like RabbitLoader.

3) Regularly Update Plugins and Themes

Old themes and plugins take up much space and make your site slower. It also ensures that no security vulnerability is available in the previous version. You could keep those updated and needed plugins and themes, but it is better to remove others, such as unnecessary themes or plugins.

Similarly to themes, the quality of your plugin affects your TTFB, so always try to identify performance-impacting plugins.

4) Use a Premium DNS Provider

Your time to first bytes highly depends on your DNS. Only the premium DNS service is not recommended for normal hosting packages. You need to buy DNS service from a premium provider (that runs lots of servers in geographically distributed data centers and answers the query for your site with the highest settings) It helps to lower your TTFB

You should also enable DNS prefetching on your site. This way, you can tell the browser to silently do the DNS lookups for a page in advance while your users browse.

5) Implement Caching

Caching is perhaps the most effective way to reduce your Time to First Byte. As we have seen above, it not only takes less time (loading) but also reduces your server's processing weight.

Utilize caching methods such as database cache, object making, and page building. Save your fetched data—this will reduce your Time To First Byte. Next time you look things up, it shows you the data instantly.

6) Reduce HTTPS Request

Last but not least, minimize the HTTPS request. Everything on the page depends on resources such as scripts and images. User experience indirectly denotes a decrease in HTTP requests, so you must evaluate all website requests periodically and make sure to remove any unnecessary images.

After that, you need to reduce the image size and analyze what is causing your site to load slower speed. You can also merge all CSS files to work towards optimizing the TTFB.

Final Thoughts

So be sure to focus on your TTFB and take steps to get as little as possible. It must provide an excellent user experience and increase conversion rates.

But if you can't change the user's unique environment, you can still apply some of these optimizations, which will help reduce the network latency.

StartMotionMedia

Time to First Byte: How to Reduce/Improve Page Load Speed