1The challenge
Time to First Byte (TTFB) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) affect both rankings and experience. For Maxifleur’s international stores:
- Visitors far from the Netherlands saw a higher TTFB.
- Magento started a session on every page load, even for cached pages.
- The mega menu and store switcher added server time to every page.
- Bot traffic from unexpected countries put extra load on the server.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a global CDN and security platform. It serves traffic from edge servers close to the visitor, which shortens load times for international customers and reduces the load on the origin server, without changing the Magento infrastructure behind it.
2Our approach
We combined an edge layer in Cloudflare with fixes inside Magento, and measured the effect per country.
Cloudflare in front
DNS moved to Cloudflare for the Maxifleur and Designplants domains, with SSL at the edge and cache rules for static assets.
Two caching layers
Magento’s full-page cache combined with Cloudflare edge caching, using cache-control headers and per-URL TTLs.
Less work per request
A session skip for cached pages, stale-while-revalidate caching and a faster mega menu and store switcher.
Measured per country
Cloudflare Analytics and real-user monitoring, tuned on p75 and p95 values per country.
3The result
Average TTFB for international visitors went down substantially and LCP improved in every measured country. Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console improved, with a positive effect on rankings for international search terms. Cloudflare now also filters unwanted bot traffic before it reaches the server.
Next step: tightening the bot rules further, based on the traffic data the marketing team sees.
?Frequently asked questions about TTFB and Cloudflare
What is TTFB?
Time to First Byte is how long it takes before the browser receives the first byte of a page. It comes before everything else, so a slow TTFB delays every other metric.
Is a CDN enough to fix TTFB?
Not on its own. A CDN helps for cached content, but uncached requests still depend on Magento. That’s why we also reduced the work Magento does per request.
Does Cloudflare work with Magento’s full-page cache?
Yes, when the cache rules are set up carefully. Magento’s full-page cache and Cloudflare’s edge cache then work as two layers.
Can Cloudflare also block bots?
Yes. For Maxifleur it filters unwanted bot traffic and abusive crawlers before they reach the server.
