www.mydomain.com vs www.mydomain.com/index.html

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

Hi everyone. I test my site regularly and recently noticed a discrepancy in the results for the First Byte Time (especially) when running a test on www.mydomain.com as compared to Web Hosting, Domain Name Registration - MyDomain.com

Has anyone else noticed this? I recently upgraded the site to https and redirect the http to the new secure site, which is when I first noticed this.

But the www.mydomain.com could report a TTFB of 1100 ms, while the Web Hosting, Domain Name Registration - MyDomain.com reports a TTFB of 200 ms. So it’s a significant difference.

Which one would Google look at?

I’m really curious what everyone thinks. I take SEO and site speed very seriously and have been working little by little to improve it (A big thanks to WebPageTest for the amazing resource!), so I want to get this right.

Thanks everyone for your help!

2

Good question - I’ve seen issues like this before. Sometimes a server does a 301 redirect that’s causing unnecessary delay - and you’d be able to see that in your waterfall. Other times it has to do with a caching layer or firewall (are you using something like cloudflare?)

Can you post both WPT test results so we can dig deeper?

3

Post your actual URL.

Attempt to guess why tends to be counterproductive.

Better to know (real data) than to guess.

4

I apologize for not including the actual domain. I got in trouble on another site for posting the actual domain (they claimed it was “advertising” as ridiculous as that is), so I didn’t think I was supposed to do that…

The website is www.disasterblaster.com

I have also attached the WebPageTest report for both the disasterblaster.com and disasterblaster.com/index.html so that you can see what I’m talking about.

Please note that, while WebPageTest says that I do not have a CDN, I do have that set up, and have confirmed that with my host, so I’m not sure there. But I wanted to mention that in case it mattered.

I did already open a support ticket with my host about this, but I’m not sure what specifically to have them look at…

Thank you everyone for your responses to my issue. I appreciate the help and experience.
[hr]
Oh, also to answer your question MachMetrics, I’m not using Cloudflare and I don’t think I’m using anything similar. I don’t believe I have anything like that enabled on my hosting package.

5

Several problems are coming into play.

  1. You’re using CloudFlare, so all bets are off about what problem might be.

  2. You appear to be using a Windows ASP backend site. If you’re actually running ASP code, then you must use ASP. If you’re just serving content, best to switch to LAMP.

If you read through many WPT post, first step of debugging is always remove CloudFlare as it tends to work poorly (only slow down fast sites) + introduces problem sets which are near impossible to debug.

So, remove CloudFlare + retest.

If you aren’t actually running ASP code, switch to LAMP for easier tuning.