Site Speed slow with Zaraz

Hi,
I am setting up google ads and GA4 through Zaraz and enabled it briefly to check all is firing before I remove script from my html headers, however while it was enabled my site was really slow - I understand that if I had removed the script it should have been faster but I had paused all ad campaigns. I then disabled Zaraz and noticed that my site speed is still really slow. I then cleared all cache from site and cloudflare and it was still loading really slowly.

My server response time is over 7.5 seconds! Does anyone know how would I check whether it may coincidentally be an issue with the servers in South Africa and not related to the Zaraz set up? I even deleted the google and meta scripts and the server response time was still the same. Your assistance would be greatly appreciated.

I’d start by checking if it isn’t the server hosting the website that’s the culprit for the slowdown. Can you try sending a GET request to it directly, not proxied through Cloudflare? You can test it by adding your server’s IP address in this command:

curl https://your.website.com/ --resolve 'your.website.com:443:192.0.1.2'

(change 192.0.1.2 to the IP of your server)