Hello 🙂
TFB and serve a page to guest are two different metrics. A TTFB of 300ms it is in acceptable terms. Maybe not the best but acceptable.
That's normal as testing a static page .html is a lot faster than the dynamic homepage. For the dynamic page you must hit your cache method and Mysql before you get the TTFB.
There is no such thing, hosting with good or bad TTFB as there are many factors for TTFB. (Check below the different factors).
Cloudflare offer all or at least almost all the optimizations of pagespeed and a few more i can say for images and also they have to use resources for that and not use your server resources like cpu,ram etc
I did some tests today and i was not able to hit that issue that Adlago report but maybe that's me and the issue exist or another issue exist that is adding that delay...
I think it will be good also to re post here some info about TTFB as it seems that there are many different understandings for the same thing:
The waiting time is related to:
TTFB factors
Geographically relative source and target distance = how close test/visitor is to your server
DNS, server connection & response time
MySQL or database backend performance/settings
Server hardware
Expensive is not something that will guaranty low TTFB. If they promise you that you will get a low TTFB because you will get a good server, that will never happen as i explain above the factors.
Examples of why it can't be done:
For example if you are hosting your nameservers/DNS: You can't compare that by using a reputable DNS provider like:
If for example your server is at Europe let's say Italy and your visitors in the US you can't get a TTFB at 200ms by hosting yourself your DNS.
Optimization of your Mysql is very important if you are testing a dynamic web site.
Another factor is your ssl certificate. Most users use Let's Encrypt RSA 2048bit (that is great) but they have for all visitors the same certificate.
But not all visitors use some outdated Android devices and most of them can support more modern and faster certificates like an ECDSA 256bit.
So what i do is having both and let Nginx check which one to serve on each user. Using a new version of openssl also helps. Compiling by using a newer than the default GCC will help also.
There are a ton of little things that can save a few ms left and right but again for me the most important is to have the page rendering finish as soon as possible.
Of course having an expensive server it helps as you will probably get a cpu with some extra instructions set specific for ssl.
There is a lot more than getting an expensive server or get hosting A than hosting B.
So asking from Invision support to improve TTFB alone it will not help as your server should be optimized also very well and for sure you should consider the above TTFB factors. Unless that is a bug in the platform that adds that delay...
That's what i get from a client of me:
It never goes more than 150ms.
Thank you 🙂