How to Optimize Time to First Byte (TTFB) for a Lightning-Fast Ecommerce Website

Learn how to optimize your ecommerce site's speed by improving Time to First Byte (TTFB) through infrastructure and engineering best practices.

Site speed is critical for ecommerce success. But today’s consumers need multiple images, videos, interactivity, personalized recommendations, reviews, timely promotions, and other sophisticated features to keep them buying. Building and optimizing a website that delivers all of that in milliseconds is an ongoing challenge for ecommerce IT teams.

One key metric in measuring site speed is Time to First Byte (TTFB), and a low TTFB score is critical to overall site performance. TTFB is how long it takes for a browser to request a webpage and download the first byte of data from the responding server.

Improving TTFB involves much more than installing a site speed plugin. TTFB is heavily influenced by factors at the bottom of the tech stack, including the physical server the website is hosted on and network connectivity. 

In this article, we’ll look at what makes a good TTFB score and why it’s so hard (but not impossible) for most of us to improve. We’ll also discuss how the infrastructure and engineering choices your ecommerce platform provider makes ultimately impacts the speed of your website.

What is a good TTFB score?

Google ranks a TTFB score as “good” when it is 0.8 seconds (800 milliseconds) or less. In ecommerce, the ideal score is even lower to make sure customers don’t bounce, abandon their carts, or experience delays during critical buying moments such as checkout.

At Shopify, we continually optimize our infrastructure, connectivity, and platform to make sure our customers have the fastest ecommerce sites in the market. According to Google Core Web Vitals, the average Shopify site has a Time to First Byte (TTFB) or server speed of 0.51 seconds—well below the cutoff for a good TTFB score. The average TTFB of other commerce platforms is 1.4 seconds, with the slowest clocking in at 1.99 seconds.

Read more about how we optimize Shopify infrastructure for site speed.

We’ll dive in later on what it takes to improve TTFB scores, but you can already see the risk involved with using a hosting and platform provider that doesn’t optimize their stack for TTFB. Your ecommerce site could be hampered by slow performance from the get-go if the provider doesn’t invest the time and resources to make sure your site is fast.

What are the benefits of a good TTFB score?

TTFB is a metric that measures the performance of your ecommerce hosting infrastructure, including server and network performance. When you have a good TTFB score, efforts to improve site performance at the web application level won’t be hampered by factors largely beyond your control.

A good TTFB score means you have a high-performance foundation that can help you deliver seamless, immersive buying experiences. If you have a very sophisticated ecommerce presence, a good TTFB is even more critical. You don’t want your buyers to be frustrated by slow video load times or lag when they should be impressed by your robust features and functionality.

When you have a great TTFB score, it can solve core ecommerce challenges brought on by slow performance. Let’s take a look at a few key benefits of a good TTFB score.

Low bounce rate

Every millisecond matters when it comes to testing the patience of today’s online consumers. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load, your bounce rate triples, according to Semrush. In their research, the probability that a user will bounce (or land on a page and then leave it) increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. When page load times go from one second to five seconds, the probability of a bounce increases by 90%. 

Slow load times also directly impact a consumer’s willingness to purchase. According to a consumer survey by Storyblok, 33% of users who left ecommerce websites without a purchase said that slow site speed was their primary reason for bouncing.

A good TTFB means your users are getting that first byte of data in well under a second, making them much less likely to bounce. Making your site even a half-second faster can improve your bounce rate, according to Shopify data, research, and experiments.

Higher conversion

Going beyond keeping users on your site, a good TTFB score can go further and improve conversion rates. Several studies have shown that the fastest-loading retail websites have the highest conversion rates. Even a half-second increase in site speed could improve conversion. A good TTFB score is key to shaving off those milliseconds for every potential customer who visits your site.

Improved SEO

Your ecommerce website can be fully optimized for SEO from a content perspective, but if your site loads too slowly, it can drag on your rankings. 

Google’s search algorithm prioritizes websites with what they call a good “page experience.” A key factor in providing a good page experience is improving your Core Web Vitals score. Improving your Core Web Vitals involves fast loading times, which is heavily influenced by your TTFB.

Performance boosts from the right platform provider can have a major impact on search engine visibility. Online garden retailer Willemse replatformed to Shopify and improved their site speed by 100%. Three months later, they noticed a 10% increase in organic traffic. In ecommerce, performance-based SEO boosts like these can make a big impact on overall visibility, and ultimately, sales and revenue.

Why it’s so difficult to improve TTFB

We mentioned earlier that much of the work of improving TTFB is done at the bottom of the tech stack. This means you’d need access to the physical infrastructure hosting your ecommerce site—and at access levels often reserved for IT and server admins.

The work of improving TTFB includes (but is certainly not limited to):

• Adding in server-side caching mechanisms to store frequently accessed data to allow the server to fulfill certain requests faster
• Making sure the physical servers your site is hosted on have high-performance, dedicated resources, including storage, memory, and processing
• Optimizing the back-end processes that run on your hosting server, including reducing the number of queries, caching query results, and refactoring server-side code to remove anything unnecessary 
• Having a geographically distributed footprint of physical infrastructure to load balance traffic and allow users to connect to a server that is physically nearby
• Configuring and integrating a content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare to serve your static resources (such as images and video) faster

Not only do these tasks require a high level of infrastructure access and engineering know-how, they can come with a hefty price tag. Enterprise business needs and new AI applications have been placing a heavy demand on servers and the data centers they reside in. The engineers with the skills needed to manage and optimize these servers remain in short supply, commanding very high salaries to retain.

Most retailers aren’t in the cloud computing business, so the work of improving TTFB on your own can be a big challenge. For most ecommerce businesses, it’s a far better strategy to work with a provider with a dedicated focus on performance and infrastructure.

What ecommerce platform has the best TTFB score?

Most of the factors that lead to a great TTFB score are both challenging and costly to address for most retailers. But the good news is that the right ecommerce platform provider can take care of the work for you and provide a cost-effective, high-performance foundation for your website.

Let’s look at a quick example.

Skincare retailer Dermalogica replatformed to Shopify from Salesforce Commerce Cloud, boosting their overall site speed by 44%. After just one month, they experienced a 43% increase in unique visitors and a 14% decrease in bounce rate. They also saw a 119% uplift in sales and a 45% increase in conversions. Those bottom-line impacts are hard to ignore in the competitive landscape of ecommerce.

When you partner with Shopify, you get the fastest server speed in commerce, 2.8 times faster on average than other major platforms. In terms of TTFB, we set our customers up for success: the average Shopify site has a TTFB of 0.51 seconds, 0.3 seconds less than what is considered a “good” score of 0.8 seconds.

We continually improve and optimize our platform to give customers fast, high-performing storefronts. Our global infrastructure helps deliver your website at the edge to customers, providing them a great experience no matter where they are. And our storefront software is also distributed at the edge in each location, instead of centralizing it to a single location.

All of this adds up to lightning-fast ecommerce. We recently took a look at publicly available Core Web Vitals data on more than 200,000 ecommerce stores hosted on major ecommerce platforms. Here’s what we found when we compared the speeds of stores hosted on other platforms to those hosted on Shopify:*

Shopify vs. BigCommerce

• Shopify’s server speed is 1.9x faster on average than BigCommerce

Shopify vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

• Shopify’s server speed is 2.2x faster on average than Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s

Shopify vs. Adobe Commerce (Magento)

• Shopify’s server speed is 3.4x faster on average than Adobe Commerce’s

Shopify vs. WooCommerce

• Shopify’s server speed is 3.9x faster on average than WooCommerce’s

Shopify vs. custom-built stores

• Shopify’s server speed is 2.4x faster on average than custom-built stores’

*According to data from Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), collected for a representative sample of sites on Shopify and its competitors. Specifically, the first and third data points for each named competitor look at First Contentful Paint, while the second data point looks at Time to First Byte. For the custom-built comparison, the first point looks at TTFB and the second point looks at FCP. To learn more, read the full report.

An ecommerce platform fully optimized for TTFB

TTFB is just one metric of many when it comes to optimizing for speed—but it is critical for delivering seamless, high-performance buying experiences. By reducing TTFB, retailers can boost conversions, lower bounce rates, and supercharge their SEO strategies to drive organic traffic growth.

But much of the work of improving TTFB is at the foundational infrastructure level, far removed from the day-to-day expertise and access levels of most retailers. That's why partnering with the right platform is the best way to never have to worry about TTFB again.

Shopify's global infrastructure and continuous optimization efforts make sure that every customer website performs exceptionally well—and outperforms the competition by quite a bit. When you build your site on Shopify, you can deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive growth without worrying about the complexities of backend performance optimization.

Want to know how your ecommerce website stacks up? Get a personalized site speed analysis to see how your site performance could be impacting your sales and how it compares to the competition.

FAQ on Time to First Byte (TTFB)

What is TTFB?

Time to First Byte (TTFB) measures how long it takes for a browser to request a webpage and download the first byte of data from the responding server. It is a critical metric to review and optimize to improve overall website usability and performance.

Why is TTFB so high?

Many network and server-related factors contribute to a high TTFB score in ecommerce. If your hosting or platform provider has under-resourced their servers and infrastructure, it can lead to slow response times, especially when experiencing peak traffic. If the hosting servers are physically far from your customers (for example, someone in New York accessing a server in California), response times can be slowed down as requests travel across the network. Back-end issues such as excessive server-side scripting and database queries can also impact your TTFB. Many other factors, such as plugins and resource-heavy content management systems can also contribute to slow TTFB.

What is a good TTFB score?

According to Google, a good TTFB score is 0.8 seconds (800 milliseconds) or less. An ideal TTFB score is much lower, especially if your ecommerce website is very robust, to ensure every part of your website loads quickly for your customers.

How to fix TTFB?

Fixing or improving your TTFB score can be a major challenge if you don’t have access to the physical servers that host your ecommerce website. Steps to improve TTFB include adding in server-side caching mechanisms, ensuring you have enough dedicated server sources, and optimizing backend processes to reduce queries and streamline code. Having a geographically distributed footprint of servers and using a CDN can also help improve your TTFB score. For ecommerce retailers, the easiest fix is often to find the right hosting provider that is already optimized for a low TTFB.