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Issue 032BenchmarkPerformanceRef 095

TTFB is the budget you forgot to set

Server response time, or Time to First Byte (TTFB), is a foundational metric often overlooked in website performance discussions. Neglecting it undermines all other optimisation efforts.

Andrew Pemberton· Development Director
5 min readReviewed February 2025
"TTFB is spending your performance budget before you've even loaded a single asset."
Written by
Andrew Pemberton, Development Director at iWeb
Andrew Pemberton
Development Director
19 years at iWeb

Andrew leads the development practice at iWeb and owns the delivery runbooks behind large commerce migrations. He writes about release governance, deployment sequencing, parallel-run strategy, and the engineering decisions that reduce operational risk during complex transformation programmes. Focused on stable delivery, observable systems, and migration approaches that avoid unnecessary disruption to trading.

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