If It Takes You a Second to Serve (or Receive) a Page, That's Definitely Too Slow
Longstanding research shows readers expect response not in seconds but in a lot less time than the brain can process words/ideas (also, get to the point fast)
As noted moments ago in the sister site, Clownflare is collapsing and excuses about "hey hi" (slop) don't fool enough shareholders. A quarter of them dumped the stock - or rather - a quarter of the shares got dumped in less than a day. Sooner or later Clownflare will charge a lot of money. Or bring age-gating to their hostages. If your site 'feels' fast because it was outsourced to Clownflare (i.e. it is in fact served by Clownflare, not by you or your server/s), than you are only fooling yourself and the worst is yet to come.
We'll never ever use Clownflare. At work, I helped clients that adopted Clownflare. Awful stuff!
Improvements continue to be made at the network layer. This was yesterday:
For speeds at milliseconds (e.g. for pages to fully load in a tenth of a second) the pages must be ready to be sent as soon as they're requested. No CDNs required (they're about caching, which isn't speed, it's just "cheating").
We are grateful to see other sites recognising this [1, 2]. At my end, Cyber Show now takes less than a tenth of a second to load from right here in Manchester. It's about a hundred times faster than it was a week ago. Try clicking any of the pages in this index to appreciate just how fast that is. █