Measure TTFB from 40 Locations

Yes, it does matter! Having a low TTFB ensures a great user experience due to nearly instant page load times (assuming the rest of your page speed metrics are also good). If the TTFB is high, the user has to wait on a blank screen until the server responds. TTFB has a major indirect impact on Web Vitals Scores.

TTFB Test performs the test on a single resource (such as a CSS File, HTML Document, or Image) to see how fast it loads. While the Website Speed Test loads all the resources on a Web Page just like a browser does and calculates the page speed based on that.

You can improve TTFB by using a CDN, optimizing your backend code & database performance, using Memory Caching, and by using a better hosting provider that provides better hardware resources. You can refer to our guide to improve TTFB.

You only need to ensure that you have low TTFB in regions where most of your website visitors live. But if you have a global audience, you should aim to have a low TTFB worldwide.

You can achieve a low TTFB worldwide by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and/or by having multiple servers across the globe with a load balancer that can route the traffic from the server closest to the user.

There are many good CDN providers you can choose from. We recommend Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai and KeyCDN.

By default, CDN providers only cache your website's static resources such as Images, JavaScript, CSS, and Font Files. They do not cache HTML by default. Hence, you'll not see an improvement in TTFB while testing a Web Page. To see an improvement, you will need to perform the test on that resource instead.

To reduce the TTFB of Web Pages, you can either Enable HTML Caching at your CDN provider or you can use a static site convertor such as Gatsby.js and host it on a platform like Netlify. We recommend Cloudflare's Full Page Caching to cache HTML content by setting up a Page Rule (WordPress users can also use Cloudflare APO).