3 Easy Steps to Optimize TTFB for a Higher Core Web Vital Score from Global Traffic

Jake Lett May 26, 2023

I was constantly getting low scores when I tried to optimise my core web vitals for our store website(https://shop.devstoc.com). Visitors to my website come from all over the world, with the majority coming from United States, Europeans and the Indians. When I tested my site on my computer, the speed scores were excellent. However, Google Search Console continued to report slow loading because it was calculating using field data. Basically, data collected from all visitors worldwide. As a result, I had to optimise the load times for US and Europe.

So I started looking for ways to improve this and noticed that my initial load times were extremely slow, especially for the TTFB. This was due to the fact that when someone in India requested my website, it was downloading files from a server in Europe, the United States, or Asia. As a result, loading times were long. I tried again with the free Cloudflare CDN cache and encountered the same problem.

Before moving further, first let us know few things about TTFB.

What is TTFB?

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a fundamental metric for determining connection setup time and web server responsiveness in the lab and in the field. It aids in determining when a web server is taking too long to respond to requests. It comes before any other meaningful loading performance metric in the case of navigation requests—that is, requests for an HTML document.

Check TTFB using cURL

Here's an example of using cURL from your Linux or Mac terminal app to check TTFB. Replace "https://shop.devstoc.com/" with your domain in the following command:

curl -o /dev/null -w "Connect: %{time_connect} TTFB: %{time_starttransfer} Total time: %{time_total} \n" https://shop.devstoc.com/
############################ O U T P U T ######################################
% Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 34782    0 34782    0     0   143k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  144k
Connect: 0.018 TTFB: 0.231 Total time: 0.236

3 Plugins or services to optimize TTFB

This is when I found some of the premium features, such as Tiered Cache, Argo Smart Routing and Automatic Platform Optimisation. I re-ran my tests to see how long it took to get to the first byte and noticed a significant difference after bought these services. So, if you are trying to optimise a website that attracts traffic from all over the world, I highly recommend that you try the following optimisations.