Let me guess: You just spent six months optimizing your frontend. You swapped out jQuery for a sleek React-based framework, lazy-loaded every asset like a pro, and even shaved milliseconds off your Lighthouse score. But guess what? Your bounce rate hasn’t budged.
Welcome to TTFB Hell—where your SaaS dies a slow death before the browser even gets the first byte.
TTFB (Time to First Byte) is the time it takes for a user’s browser to receive the first byte of data from your server after making an HTTP request. Sounds simple, right? And yet, it’s the silent killer of otherwise solid SaaS platforms.
Google considers anything above 200ms as "needs improvement".
But here’s the kicker: even a perfect frontend can’t compensate for a server that takes forever to say “hello.”
And then you wonder why your Google PageSpeed score yells at you.
If you’re just eyeballing TTFB from your browser’s Network tab, you’re doing it wrong.
TTFB isn't just latency — it's latency plus backend overhead plus your infra sins.
Google doesn’t officially use TTFB in Core Web Vitals, but guess what? It’s still part of crawl budget and indexing efficiency.
Users aren’t waiting 600ms to maybe see a hero image. They're gone. Especially in B2B SaaS, where first impressions are the entire funnel.
One of our B2B SaaS clients came to us with a Lighthouse score of 92 but a bounce rate over 70%. Why? TTFB was over 1.1 seconds in the U.S. and worse in Europe. After profiling their Node.js backend and routing logic, we:
Final result? TTFB dropped to 110ms, and conversion went up 34%.
Need help diagnosing what’s really causing your backend latency? We’ve scaled SaaS products across five continents. Let’s make your platform responsive before users ghost it.
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