attempts from a browser or user since it has already received a connection and is now preparing for the content download. TTFB vs load time Load time is how long it takes for a webpage to be loaded and usable by a browser. Often in web page delivery a page is compressed in the Gzip format to make the size of the download smaller. This practice prevents the first byte from being sent until the compression is complete and increases the TTFB significantly. TTFB can go from 100–200 ms to 1000–20000 ms, but the page will load much faster and be ready for the user in a much smaller amount of time. Many websites see a common 5–10× increase in TTFB but a much faster browser response time garnering 20% load-time decrease. References Network performance