Nothing Else Matters If Your Server Is Slow
Come closer. Listen.
Time to First Byte is how long it takes for the server to send the very first byte of data back to the browser.
If your TTFB is 2 seconds, your LCP cannot possibly be under 2 seconds. Simple math.
TTFB is the foundation. Everything else stacks on top of it. Google covers this in their Web Vitals documentation.
What Is a Good TTFB?
Under 200ms for static/cached content. Under 600ms for dynamic pages. Anything over 1 second is a problem.
Why Your TTFB Is Bad
Cheap shared hosting. You are sharing a server with 500 other websites. When one of them gets traffic, your site slows down. Lovely.
No caching. Every page request hits your database, runs your PHP/Python/Node code, and generates HTML from scratch. For content that has not changed in weeks.
Bloated CMS. WordPress with 40 plugins, each adding database queries. Each query adding milliseconds. Those milliseconds add up fast.
No CDN. See our CDN post. Physics is a thing.
The Fixes
Upgrade your hosting. Seriously. Going from a $5/month shared host to a $20/month VPS can cut TTFB by 80%.
Add server-side caching. Redis, Varnish, or even full-page HTML caching. If your content does not change every second, cache it.
Optimize database queries. Those 47 WordPress plugins each running 3 database queries on every page load? Cut them down.
Use a CDN for the edge-caching layer on top. And make sure your browser caching is configured properly too.
Measure, Then Fix
Do not optimize blindly. Measure your TTFB first. Then fix the biggest bottleneck. Then measure again.
Our free SEO checklist walks you through every speed metric, including TTFB. 113 tasks. No credit card. 30 seconds to set up.