We’ve had an SEO audit done on our community. There are a number of improvements we’ll present here as ideas.
This is based on the community.insided.com implementation of the Insided Platform, but the basic principles extend to all properties utilising it – including the ones we employ.
One of the things we're working towards is reaching core web vital thresholds (LCP <2500ms, FID < 250ms, CLS < 250ms) in order to have the domain comply with Google's expectation for the upcoming Page Experience update in Q1 2022.
The single biggest blocker to this at the moment is the TTFB for the initial request to the server. As illustrated in the WPT profile for this domain, the TTFB for the initial request is 700ms – though we routinely see this go as high as 1000ms.
With the stack the current way it is, this means we can't start fetching the required assets as late as 800ms in. That means in order to comply with the 2500ms LCP cutoff, we already "lost" a third of the window by the time the browser can even start interpreting the data.
There are a few way of bringing this down, some more feasible than others, depending on the stack employed. Something that could be considered would be introducing a low level caching solutions between the application and CF.
Alternatively, services such as Fastly could be used as a drop-in for Cloudfront and would give you access to features such as VCL scripting.
Ultimately, a small (read: 150/200ms) decrease in the TTFB would be enough to push these properties into the acceptable ranges.
