Cloudflare Origin Server Location & Argo and other Optimizations for Pagespeed Insights

Google Webmaster Console adding a new Speed Report which also evaluates and displays page speed based on First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID) Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: Get faster with the new Speed report in Search Console which is based on Google PageSpeed Insights v5 and CrUX Chrome User report metrics which are real user based. So geographic distance and physics of network distance factor into page speed by real users. If your real visitor is on a slow 3G 1.6Mbps mobile connection and you have 1200KB sized page, it takes in theory 1200/204 = 5.88 seconds to download excluding any network overhead, packet loss, and mobile device related factors (slow cpu etc = slower javascript parsing and execution). No Cloudflare acceleration will make physics of it all any faster for that particular 3G slow mobile user.

Sure CF can help with reduce size of images on mobile i.e. Mirage so that 1200KB sized page may end up at 900KB after image optimisations. But still 900/204 = 4.41 seconds. In theory you’d need for a page size + ads + external scripts to not total more than 400KB for it to hit reasonable metrics for 3G mobile speed test.

Google PageSpeed Insights tests your site’s theme/layout as well and how it’s put together which Cloudflare can only partially help with. The rest is on your and/or your web developers/theme/layout choices.

Google PageSpeed Insights v5 is heavily weighted towards interactive and speedindex and first contentful paint metrics on 3G moto g4/nexus 5 device emulation. So for dynamic and javascript heavy sites, 3G mobile score or heavily render blocked asset based sites, the score will be lower. From v5 API this is the weighting used to determine the score

• interactive 5
• speed-index 4
• first-contentful-paint 3
• first-cpu-idle 2
• first-meaningful-paint 1

You really shouldn’t look at the overall scores but the metric’s values measured over time to get your relative page speed. Field data origin summary would be that over time measurement rather than the lab data scores which is what the score rating is measured from.

My write up on PageSpeed Insights v5 update at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/google-pagespeed-insights-v5-update.16016/

For pagespeed tests, also use webpagetest.org for pagespeed testing - my guide at https://community.centminmod.com/th...getest-org-for-page-load-speed-testing.13859/

According Chrome Dev Summit talks/slides looks like in January 2020, Google Lighthouse v6 will be released so Google PageSpeed Insights v6 will be out too. They are adjusting the weighting and adding new metrics for the Pagespeed score - moving First Contentful Paint (FCP) to a higher weighting than it has in Google PageSpeed v5 and also adding a Total Blocking Time (TBT) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCF) metric https://twitter.com/bunopus/status/1193999246812278784. Both First CPU Idle and First Meaningful Paint (FMP) metrics are being removed.

Actual Google Dev Summit 2019 Youtube session that talks about this is here.

According to data compiled by Web Almanac 2019 By HTTP Archive 1, First Contentful Paint (FCP) metric is highly influenced by the type of device (desktop/mobile), ISP connection speed and geography

 

Argo is for server response times part of page load factors which are many including how your page/theme is structured and how your assets are optimised see https://community.centminmod.com/threads/cloudflare-argo-smart-routing-in-action.17517/

 

Pagespeed is still geographically dependent. This is due to Cloudflare not caching HTML content by default but only static files. So for optimal TTFB speed, you want your origin real web server to be hosted in a location closest to your majority traffic visitors and then put Cloudflare in front. For instance, my forums has 50% US visitors 40% Asian visitors and 10% Oceania. So my optimal geographic location for my origin is US West Coast as it sits in middle of US, Europe and Asian so equal round trip times for majority of visitors.

Cloudflare cache certain static content https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-Which-file-extensions-does-Cloudflare-cache-for-static-content- but not dynamic/static generated html itself by default (which is what WPT TTFB is testing for). But you can tell Cloudflare to cache dynamic/static generated html content to some extent depending on Cloudflare plan you’re on via cache everything page rule but have to be careful to only do this for static html content and not dynamic html content (otherwise you would cache private logged in user content).

• How do I cache static HTML?
• How Do I Tell Cloudflare What to Cache? 1
• https://blog.Cloudflare.com/caching-anonymous-page-views/ on CF Business plan you can properly distinguish between logged in users versus guests so tell Cloudflare via bypass cache on cookie page rules to only cache for guests the dynamic/static generated html content and bypass cache for logged in users. Then on CF Business plan you have access to Railgun which allows you to accelerate dynamic generated html content for the logged in users Railgun™ | Cloudflare. Then there’s also Argo for optimising the routing to your origin as well https://www.cloudflare.com/products/argo-smart-routing/

 

You can also use Cloudflare Browser Insights https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-browser-insights/ and Google Analytics pagespeed data to drill into your CF accelerated web site’s analytic and page speed metrics and see which geographic region/pages are slow for you as well and which areas pull down your averages, median and percentile values for page speed.

 

Google Adsense will definitely slow pages according to PageSpeed Insights but is necessary if you want to earn $$$$

 

haha trying getting FCP under 1 second = 1000ms with these Google Adsense/Facebook scripts !

This was webpagetest.org Google Lighthouse test on 3G Fast 1.6Mbps profile with Nexus 5 mobile device