Research findings published in August was released that showed the effect of web performance based on web performance and a website’s search engine rank. 100,000 sites were tested by performance, and it was found that the faster time to first byte (TTFB), the higher the search engine rank was for the website.
In a following article written by Zoompf, he goes more in depth about TTFB, such as what it is, how it works, what affects it and how to measure it. He also provides information on what you can do to improve latency, Optimizing back-end infrastructure and back-end software performance.
Following is a link that goes to the full article:
http://moz.com/blog/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte