Hi, I tried activating Argo a few days ago, but I can’t seem to understand if that’s actually working: explaining better, all kind of performance tools tells me the loading speed is not improving (sometimes even worse than before), and from search console also the average download time has increased from the day I activated it:
Does Argo need more time to be working correctly? Or could it be also a geographical issue, my main audience being in Italy and since Cloudflare only has one server in Italy maybe there’s no real improvement from my actual server that’s also in Italy?
thank you for your answer, I also used pingdom to measure Argo performance and the results are pretty much the same.
The biggest issue always seems to be the TTFB (and I know my origin server might not be very fast), but what I don’t understand is why after upgrading my free account with Argo the website started to get slower and not faster.
The issue I see with Argo in Italy (I have it enable only on one domain, I need Argo Tunnel) is that the main POP seems to be FRA, so if the server is closer to Milan (or Zurich, depending on the ISP, since Rome isn’t enabled most times on Free plans) than Frankfurt the double hop will cause reduced speed.
I would highly recommend setting good Cache-Control headers, Argo improves performances more in the case of single server with a global audience. Short distances, especially within Europe which is extremely well connected, are not improved.
If you are interested in some more info share the domain name and maybe the infrastructure you are using. Most performance improvements can derive from improvements there.
thank you for your answer, from what I understood from your message is that it can actually be that Argo made it worse.
also after reading the guides on Cloudflare chaching html could be a sort of solution to improve loading times, I’m just not sure it’s the best way (and if there are cons in doing so since I never done that)
