I’ve got a ‘Pro Plan’ at Cloudflare. Starting on Tuesday, Dec 28, the ‘Average response time’ of my webpages at Google Search Console increased from 100 ms to 200 ms, and I’m worried. I’ve seen the rise both in the pages with 200 response (OK), as well as with 301 response (Moved permanently).
I’m trying to analyze the origin of this sudden rise. The only change I performed in Cloudflare in the last week was the creation of the following Page Rule to 301-redirect the traffic http://www.de.subdomain.domain.com/* —> https://de.subdomain.domain.com/$1
(I’ve just removed such Page Rule today, since it wasn’t working)
I’ve open a supporting ticket with my hosting service, to check that there is no network issue.
I wondered if there was any method to check deeply this issue. Thank you.
A tenth of a second is practically a statistical variance. I suggest you just keep an eye on the average response time over a longer span of time and see if it changes. It might even go back down on its own.
Thank you very much for your kind answer. Yes, 0.1 sec may be statistical variance, but there were two occurrences in a row (two days in a row, 190 and 200 ms) after more than two years with values lower than 120 ms.
Three years ago, the ‘Average response time’ of Google Search Console of my website rose from 100 ms to 300 ms, and it took me 6 months to find the origin (misconfiguration of the Cloudflare’s SSL/TLS section). This increase in response time was coincident with a Google penalty and a 30% drop in traffic, which I recovered a few months after restoring the ‘Average response time’. Obviously, I can’t be sure that one thing was the cause of the other (because I made more changes to my website at the same time), but I’m quite panicked about this ‘Average response time’.
The last value of the ‘Average response time’ has now dropped from 200 ms to 150 ms. I’m going to follow your directions, and wait a week to take further action.
May I ask you for your domain so we can test it on our side. Please also keep in mind that the Average responstime is depending on a lot of thing, but without any further knowledge about your website it will be hard for everyone to give any tips.
Can you also see this drop in performance by calling the page, or is it just on paper? And if you can see it, have you tried curl-ing your page through Cloudflare and compre it to curl-ing it while you connect directly to your server?
I write down the changes I make daily on my website, and I have noted that on 28.12.2020 I did a “Purge Everything” on my ‘Caching Configuration’ at CloudFlare.
Within my ‘Page Rules’, I established the following rule for some web pages and thousands of images Browser Cache TTL: a year, Cache Level: Cache Everything
So I guess, as every year the data source is read back from my origin server, it is taking a bit longer these days. I will check the traffic from my origin server.
Cloudflare cache does not keep data for very long. I believe it’s 4 hours by default. You would need an Edge Cache TTL setting to increase that, but unused items will probably be automatically purged in less than a day.
Thank you for your answer. I’ve added the ‘Edge Cache TTL’ setting for each Page Rule dealing with images (ico, png, jpg, webp). Browser Cache TTL: a year, Cache Level: Cache Everything, Edge Cache TTL: a month
My intention is that users do not access directly to my origin server and CloudFlare is the one that serves the images as much as possible. I don’t know if I have understood correctly.
Anyway, the value of the ‘Average response time’ in the ‘Google Search Console’ is back to 200+ ms levels.