Do you often irritate with the way a webpage you want to visit takes too much time to open? With the global increase in bandwidth today, people are enjoying fast internet connection and are able to download large sizes of data files in relatively lesser time. However, the tolerance level towards loading pages is also plunging. So the issue of TTFB (Time to First Byte) is increasingly becoming crucial.
In this post we will delve into the concept of TTFB; how it affects you; how to measure it, reduce it or optimize it using various tools and techniques.
What is TTFB?
Simply put, “time to first byte” is a key metric that determines the responsiveness of a web server. That is, it tells you the time taken in creating a connection to the server and downloading the contents of a webpage.
When your browser tries to establish a connection to a web server, it has to go through the following steps:
- DNS Lookup
- Initial Connection
- Waiting
- Receiving Data
- Closing Connection
So clearly, the TTFB has three important components:
- Time needed to process request through the network to the web server
- Time needed for web server to process he request and generate the response
- Time needed for the server to send back the first byte of the response to the browser