How to Optimise Your Time to First Byte (TTFB) to Improve Search Results
What is TTFB?
Time
to First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes a user to receive the first byte from
a web server when requesting a particular URL. After testing several websites,
data showed that although there is no solid evidence to suggest
ranking had a strong correlation to TTFB values, the correlation was strong enough to
analyse further. From graphical data captured by search results, it is evident
that websites with a lower TTFB ranked higher than those with higher TTFB. And
this isn’t just valid for short keyword searches, it is also valid for long
ones with multiple keywords.
The Effect of Website Speed on Search Ranking
Google
search uses a large number of parameters to determine search ranking. These
factors are mostly linked to the content on the web page, its URL, headers and
titles, the authenticity of the web page itself – domain age and name, quality
of inbound links, and number of inbound links. In 2010, Google announced that
website speed would start factoring into search rankings, meaning the speed at
which a user could view the content of a web page would determine its ranking
in search engine results.
However,
the exact definition of website speed remained ambiguous and led to much
speculation.
It
was evident that Google had decided to act upon something that was clearly
visible to all users of their search engine – the speed at which a web page
loaded – which in turn determines how smooth a user’s experience is. Therefore,
sites with poor user experiences were penalized in the search results.
When
investigations to determine the basis on which pages ranked high or low on the
basis of website speed, the only measure found to offer
significant correlation was Time to First Byte (TTFB).
How to measure TTFB
The
most common tool for measuring a website’s performance is Web Page Test, a
diagnostic tool initially developed by America Online. Web Page Test is under active
development by GitHub, a web based hosting service for open source projects.
Web
Page Test is an easy to use tool to understand where your web page stands in
terms of performance. Visit their webpage and select a location most suitable
to the user and run a test against the web page. Web Page Test will return a
‘waterfall’ chart with details of the website’s performance, including TTFB. If
the TTFB of a web page is found to be too long (slow), then the next step is to
determine the cause of and address the problem. One main cause of high TTFB
values is Latency.
Latency
Latency
is the time taken to transmit a single data packet from one location to
another. Contrary to what most people believe, having a high bandwidth internet
connection does not guarantee low latencies. This is because latency measures
how far a packet of data has to travel, regardless of the bandwidth of a user.
A data packet will have to travel the same distance to a certain server,
whether it travels over a high bandwidth connection or a low bandwidth one.
How much latency must a web page have to be ranked well?
From
research conducted on the correlation between TTFB and page ranking, the top
ranking websites had a TTFB of 350 millisecond. The Ideal TTFB value was found
to be in the vicinity of 500 ms or less. Of this value, 100 ms should be
round trip latency (time taken for the data packet to travel to the server and
back), and the remaining 400ms should be spent on backend processing.
How to improve latency using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Since
latency is the time taken for a data packet to travel a certain distance, the
solution is to reduce the distance between the two locations. An ideal way to
achieve this is by moving static content on your web page to a Content Delivery
Network (CDN), which replicates this content to multiple locations around the
world, so that your users can access the content more easily. If you have any
doubts regarding CDN, or anything related to SEO, you can contact an SEO
company for help and guidance on improving your website speed.
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