I have a problem with response time of my web page. I am using Cloudflare’s CDN for some time, and I recently changed a template of my Joomla site. I did all oprimisations on my site in order to make it faster and to score better in organic search (lazy loading, and all that stuff).
However, now my worst metric now is server response time, even that I am using Cloudflare, and I turned on Caching. The first suggestion from Google to me is “Reduce initial server response time”!
I added Cache Level: Cache Everything for https://dentalspa.co.rs/. I configured TTL Caching for 5 days. I use “standard caching”. And nothing helped…
I suspect your hosting provider is slow, or at least slow to respond to Cloudflare. What kind of hosting provider are you using? What is your initial server response time without using Cloudflare?
Did you put an asterisk * (wildcard) at the end of the URL?
Also, your site is now available in both dentalspa.co.rs and www.dentalspa.co.rs. You should make either one as your main one. Eg. you can redirect dentalspa.co.rs to www.dentalspa.co.rs using page rules.
Then, the Cache Everything rule should match www.dentalspa.co.rs/*.
I couldn’t put asterisk in the comment. The comment editor eliminates it. This is how my config looks like (I uploaded the screenshot). I gues it should work. Is it any way to be shure that the caching is working?
Thanks for the useful suggestion. I checked both “Proxied” and “DNS only” options on Cloudflare. It was a supprising discovery! Take a look at the results. DNS only is faster then proxied! Now I am realy confused…
Thanks for the replay. I did. Check the screenshot that I uploaded. I just couldn’t put it into the comment. The editor automaicaly eliminated the asterisk for some reason.
This indicates that there is some distance between Cloudflare and your host, where exactly is your server hosted? You may benefit from putting it in central Europe (if you’re in Europe)
Moreso, it seems that your host is still a little slow responding to initial requests, improving this will likey be of better benefit that moving your server
Take a look at your server, are you using Nginx or Apache? What kind of CPU does your server have? Is there anything CPU intensive for the server when loading the page?
I am using the server from a web hosting company, and the only thing I can see is that the server is Apache. I’ll try to contact them and resolve issue with them. I’ll let you know the results!
Usually Cloudflare routes traffic from the biggest PoPs, not necessarily the closest ones.
We also have slower results on Cloudflare free version, from Argentina.
You can see where does Cloudflare routes your traffic from https://www.dentalspa.co.rs/cdn-cgi/trace
COLO is the location of the Cloudflare server where you traffic is routed.
I’d advice confirm any issues with your hosting provider and maybe consider using a paid version of Cloudflare or either optimize and protect your site without it.
Normally they route traffic through the fastest one, but limited to the pops available in the plan the domain is in.
So if it would be always the biggest I would have been served all the time from the same “biggest” pop. But it changes ever some hours.
True that. Sometimes the “closest” is not the fastest.
But from which POP you are getting served depends also on your:
Usually the closest is the fastest in our experience.
Indeed there are many variables involved, but for example in Argentina, all sites will be routed from Miami, even if the server is in Michigan or in Buenos Aires.
That means that most of the time, in South America, you’ll get the protection and bandwidth savings, but sites will load slower with the free version of Cloudflare.
That’s Latinamerica, maybe there are similar situations on other places, and that could explain the slower scores @vladimir.ciric showed, with and without Cloudflare.
Thanks for the replay. I was wondering who is slow in my case for couple of days now: my provider or cloudflare. Finally I came up with the proof. Take a look at the image that I attached. Total of 86% of the bandwidth was served from the Cloudflare cache. I appriciate that very much! Did’t realise till now that CF serves so much and that my actual server is contacted in only 14% or requests.
Anyway, it implies that I should seek the solution with Cloudflare than. Still don’t know how, but I’ll realise something (with your help, of course, which I appriciate!).
Actually that is wrong as you build your conclusion on “website is slow” but you actually mean “it rankes bad in Google PageSpeed Insights”
You have at the moment actually not provided any proof/fact of your site beeing “slow”.
Please notice that beeing slow or fast is just one oint which is affecting Google PageSpeed insight.
I just say this becasue you till now have just provided GPSI Screenshots.
Also Google PageSpeed Insights clearly shows where the problem have to be found:
First contentfull pain is incredible fast with “0.7s” but the rest is just not good at all.
This means: your site is responding very very fast but is not getting loaded till the end very fast. This is not a thing that Cloudflare can actively change. It will make your site faster then it was before but an unoptimized page will stay an unoptimized page.
You should clearly focus on “Frontend Optimization”
It seams that you have a point! I’ll try do better optimisation.
Regarding the “cache everything”, you confused me with the printscreen. I tought that I enabled cache. What am I doing wrong here? Where did you find to display the bottom part of the printscren that you sent, so I can check by myself?
Thats called the “Developer tools” available in every browser. If you are on Chrome just press “F12”. That should open the Developer tools. There navigate to “Network” then hard-reload your site an check the headers of the initial request.
