Guide to Time To First Byte: what it is and how to optimize pages

It is a metric that is not part of the Core Web Vitals, but it anticipates (and in some ways underlies and influences) one of these parameters and more: in short, paying attention to it is not mandatory from a ranking perspective, but it is definitely a recommended practice to improve overall site performance and user experience on our pages. Let’s find out everything we need to know about Time To First Byte, a useful indicator for the responsiveness of the web server and network resources involved in serving the site, analyzing the theoretical aspects and also the more concrete interventions to optimize our pages.

What is Time To First Byte or TTFB

Time to First Byte – usually referred to by the acronym TTFB – is a fundamental metric of web performance that refers to the time between when a browser requests a page and when it receives the first byte of information from the server.

This time for the first byte therefore helps determine the responsiveness of a web server, because it measures the amount of time that elapses between creating a connection to the server and actually downloading the contents of a web page, including DNS lookup and establishing the connection using a TCP handshake and an SSL handshake if the request is made via HTTPS.