“Time Spent Downloading a page” boosted with Cloudflare

[sansanotsansha]

Hi,

Some months ago, I started to use Cloudlfare (Pro Plan) for the security and speed benefits of this tool. However, just after changing the DNS servers of my website, the "Time Spent Downloading a page" increased from an average of 240ms to 750ms, as you can see at
[aws1.discourse-cdn.com...]

This high downloading time is damaging my SEO ranking at Google, and I wondered if anyone has a similar experience to cope with this issue (how to configurate the firewall at Cloudflare, the Speed Optimization, etc.).

Thank you very much.

[aristotle]

750ms is still much faster than most pages on the web. It seems unlikely to me that it would be slow enough to hurt rankings. So there could be another cause.

[sk7411]

Usually it should go down due to Cloudflare utilising closest POPs to in and out your server traffic to the end users , it could only mean that your host has a terrible connectivity or route to cloudflare perhaps there isn’t any POPs in the country where your server is located . My wild guess there !

[edited by: sk7411 at 2:34 pm (utc) on Oct 7, 2019]

[JorgeV]

Hello-

This is odd that your graphs are from 2018 ...

Before using Cloudflare , this is what it looked like :

client's request => your server's response => client

With CF, it becomes

client's request => CF server => your server's response => CF Server => client

Longer path, might cause more latency.

[tangor]

Any third party will add some kind of differential ... some longer than others.

HOWEVER if you reach a level of traffic and interest and are exposed to potential attacks, Cloudflare suddenly makes sense.

For most, on the other hand, it might be more than needed.

Never used it myself ... then again, sites I manage are not "viral" type in the first place and not likely to experience DdOS attacks...

[JorgeV]

Hello-

Also, keep in mind that, the (2018) graph you are showing, is displaying the time "Googlebot" takes/took, to download pages. It doesn't mean that regular visitors are getting this extra downloading time.

[topaz]

As jorge said..it's the extra handoffs with the addition of cloudflare to the mix. Nothing to worry about.

If you like you can increase the time your pages are stored in Edge Cache. That should make it client's request => CF server => client for most requests.