# Server response time

Category: [Technical SEO](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/technical-seo/) › [Servers, HTTP & caching](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/technical-seo/servers-http-caching/) · Also known as: TTFB

**Server response time** is the time a server needs to answer a request. It is often measured as Time to First Byte (TTFB), the time until the first byte of the response arrives.

## Why does server response time matter for SEO?
web.dev defines TTFB as the time from starting navigation to the first byte of the response. It includes redirects, DNS lookup, connection setup with TLS and the request itself, so it is wider than pure server processing. web.dev rates 0.8 seconds or less as good and more than 1.8 seconds as poor. An older PageSpeed Insights page from Google, marked as outdated, still gives a target of under 200 ms.

For crawling, Google's crawl budget documentation describes a crawl capacity limit. If a site slows down or responds with 5xx errors or rate-limiting signals such as 429, the limit goes down and Google crawls less. Google lists faster server responses among the ways to improve crawling.

Common causes named by web.dev are too little memory on the hosting plan, shared hosting with personalized or database-heavy pages, distance from the origin server, and missing caching. A CDN and cache headers reduce the load on the origin.

## Example
```
DNS 30 ms + connection and TLS 90 ms + server processing 400 ms = TTFB 520 ms
```

## Common mistakes
Tests run with a warm cache and hide the response time of uncached pages.

## Related terms

- [Time to First Byte (TTFB)](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/time-to-first-byte/index.md)
- [500 Internal Server Error](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/500-internal-server-error/index.md)
- [5xx server errors](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/5xx-server-errors/index.md)
- [Crawl budget](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/crawl-budget/index.md)
- [CDN (content delivery network)](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/cdn/index.md)

## More on the searchVIU blog

- [Case study: 28% page speed improvement with Cloudflare HTML caching](https://www.searchviu.com/en/html-caching-cloudflare-ecommerce/)

## Sources

- [Time to First Byte (TTFB) – web.dev](https://web.dev/articles/ttfb)
- [Optimize Time to First Byte – web.dev](https://web.dev/articles/optimize-ttfb)
- [Crawl budget management for large sites – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawl-budget)
- [Improve server response time – PageSpeed Insights (outdated)](https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/Server)

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Last updated: October 7, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/server-response-time/