If you have ever talked to a developer about your website speed, you have probably heard the term TTFB. Here is what it means in plain English, and why a low number directly grows your business.
TTFB in one sentence
Time to First Byte is the milliseconds between a visitor clicking a link and the very first piece of your page arriving on their device. Everything else (rendering, images, fonts) starts after that moment.
The benchmark
- Below 200ms, excellent. Both Google and Cloudflare consider this fast.
- 200 to 600ms, average. Acceptable but you can do better.
- Above 600ms, slow. You are losing visitors.
What it costs your business
Amazon reports that every 100ms of extra TTFB costs them 1 percent in sales. For a Ugandan retail site doing UGX 5,000,000 a month, a TTFB improvement from 800ms to 200ms can mean an extra UGX 300,000 in monthly revenue, with zero other changes.
How to lower TTFB
- Move to a faster server (LiteSpeed beats Apache by a wide margin).
- Add caching (LiteSpeed Cache or Cloudflare).
- Pick a hosting location close to your audience (Nairobi or Johannesburg for East African traffic).
- Optimise your database queries (this is what we tune for clients).