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What does "Time to first byte" indicate in Site Audit report?
What does "Time to first byte" indicate in Site Audit report?

Read on for more info on how to interpret this value and why it is important for site's overall performance

Anna avatar
Written by Anna
Updated over a week ago

If you checked Performance section in Site Audit report you might have noticed Time to First Byte (TTFB) chart:

TTFB is the time it takes for the crawler to receive the first byte of the response from a web server, measured in milliseconds. It depends on the website and network speed. Rendering JavaScript code doesn’t impact the value. Google recommends aiming for  200 ms - https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server.

If there are slow pages on your website, you may want to check on that more with a detailed report.

The report contains columns Time to First Byte and Loading Time.
In most cases Loading time is more than TTFB:

But it can also be very close or even identical:

It can be the case if there is little content to be loaded between, or if the bandwidth between the website and user is high. TTFB will mostly measure the latency between the website and the user. This will, for example, be network latency, or time that the website needs to compute the response.

Load time is the time needed to download the whole document, the difference between TTFB and Load time is the time the document is actually downloading. If the document is small, or the bandwidth between the user and the website is high, load time can be very close to TTFB.

 


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