What to ask your agency about time to first byte

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on time to first byte, these questions are worth asking early.

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Slow server response caps how fast the page can ever be. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Cheap shared hosting shows up here first. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

In practice

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. Three things worth confirming about time to first byte before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Cheap shared hosting shows up here first — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.