Response time: what a number like 210 ms from Riyadh means
What a response figure means, why cities differ, and when the gap between them is worth your attention at all.
By Salwa Al-Otaibi, reviewed by Nora Al-Mutairi · Published · Updated · 4 minutes read
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What time to first byte is
Time to first byte is the gap between the browser asking for a page and the first piece of the server’s reply arriving. It measures three things at once: the request’s journey across the network, the time the server spends building the page, and the reply’s journey back. One figure therefore cannot tell you where the time went, and cannot on its own explain slowness you can feel.
It is also not the speed your visitor experiences. After that first byte they wait for styles, images, fonts and code to run, and those usually take far more of their time. First byte is where measurement starts, not where it ends.
Why cities differ
Cities differ because the physical distance between visitor and server differs, and because the path between them is not a straight line: it crosses exchange points and intermediate networks that may carry it to another continent before it comes back. A visitor in Riyadh and a server in Frankfurt have a real journey between them, and a figure describing that journey describes only that journey.
So the figure that matters to you is the one from the cities your visitors come from, not from wherever a measurement happened to be run. Content networks shorten the distance for static files without changing anything about the time it takes to build a page that differs for every visitor.
When the difference matters
A gap between two close figures is felt by nobody. What a visitor notices is a large gap that repeats: a page that answers at once against one that hesitates on every request. And if your audience sits in one region, putting the server near it does more for your speed than moving up a plan tier.
This figure counts for pages assembled on every request — search results inside a store, a cart, an account page. A static cached page is served from memory, and first byte then says very little about the server behind it.
What this number does not measure
This site publishes no response figure for any company. Producing one requires buying a plan, installing a site on it, and requesting it repeatedly from several cities across days. That has not happened, so we show no number, and we do not republish other sites’ figures because we do not know how they were gathered.
The scores on these pages contain no performance component for the same reason, and the methodology says so: all four criteria are read from the companies’ own pages, and performance stays outside the arithmetic until a plan is bought and something is measured on it.
Where this advice stops
This text explains the figure; it does not give you one. If you meet a response table elsewhere, ask: from which city, how many times, across which days, on which plan, and was the page cached. A table without those five ranks companies on a number nobody can account for.
Next step
Questions
What counts as a good time to first byte?
There is no fixed threshold that suits every site. What can be said is that the difference a visitor feels is a large one that repeats, not a fraction of a second in a single reading.
Does a content network solve it?
It solves part of it. It brings static files closer to the visitor; it does not change the time spent assembling a page built on the origin server for every request.
Why not republish other sites’ figures?
Because a number without its method is not a number. Anyone who does not publish the city, the request count, the days and the plan has given us nothing we can check or reproduce.
Changes to this guide
- Updated
- Published
About this guide
- Salwa Al-Otaibi wrote this guide
- Nora Al-Mutairi checked the figures before publication