Will a better host improve loading speed when using APO?

[crimson]

Hello,

If I do speed test of my WP blog in sites like Pingdom, WebPageTest and GTMatrix. I often see speed being not so stable.

Especially in Pingdom and WebPageTest, I have seen sometimes there is too high “Waiting” time.

I cannot reproduce the same at my end even if I disable cache and test. And Google’s PageSpeed Insight test seems to be quite stable for my sites as well.

So, what could be the reason behind it? Is it my host? It is really ■■■■ and I had hard time with it earlier. I ended up using APO and Argo to boost its speed, instead of getting a new host (since I had taken 3 yrs plan, stupid me).

Anyway, to explain the issue better:

• My site loads at anywhere between 700ms to 5 seconds in speed test websites. For me, it loads in like 500ms without cache and 150-200ms with cache.
• It loads perfectly at my end and I don’t see much randomness in Google PageSpeed Insight or my end.
• I can see cf-cache-status: HIT for the main page as well as everything else, on Pingdom test, so cache seems to be working fine.

Yet, I see high waiting time on Pingdom tests, even on the page I tested. I have tried testing on different regions. The best remains Japan. My blog is hosted on Singapore server, so could that be the reason?

Shouldn’t it be low since it is using Cloudflare for it? Or my web host is still somehow impacting the speed?

[sandro]

APO will cache more (and manage it automatically) than the default Cloudflare setup, but anything that still needs to be fetched from your server will still rely on your server’s response. So this is not exactly APO related, but if you have response time issues, your server will most likely not respond fast enough.

If the host is the issue, switching to one with better performance will certainly help here. You can also look into other caching solutions by Cloudflare - Cache Reserve · Cloudflare Cache (CDN) docs - but a cache is what a cache is. You should really make sure your site loads fine without Cloudflare and only then use Cloudflare on top.