Stop worrying about Time To First Byte (TTFB)

This post critically analyzes the Time To First Byte (TTFB) metric, demonstrating through experiments with a custom Go server and tools like WebPageTest and Gomez that TTFB often measures the first byte of the HTTP response, not the first byte of the page content. It further illustrates how compression (gzip) significantly improves download time while negatively impacting TTFB, making TTFB a misleading indicator of performance. The post advocates for measuring actual end-user page visibility time and highlights Cloudflare's commitment to developing tools for this purpose, moving away from relying on TTFB as a primary metric.