Core Web Vitals - Google is driving me nuts

[rickhz]

I have made no changes yet they are blasting me once again for LCP speed. It was high for years, then it settled down and they showed 20,000+ pages in the good range for several months. Now they are showing the same pages with a poor ranking again.

Super frustrating!

 

[smallwheels]

I have made no changes yet they are blasting me once again for LCP speed. It was high for years, then it settled down and they showed 20,000+ pages in the good range for several months. Now they are showing the same pages with a poor ranking again.

You seem to have a serious bot problem on your forum:



Possibly they do influence site performance. Possibly getting rid of those scaper bots will boost performance and Google will like you more again.

 

[Alvin63]

It could be bots slowing the loading times down. What does pagespeed insights show?

 

[Walter]

Loads very slow for me, 63749 guests online (probably most of them bots).

 

[new_view]

Do CDNs improve this kinda stuff? Like cloudfront.

 

[BrettC]

Classic symptom of ai-scraper hammering. See the later pages of https://xenforo.com/community/threads/crazy-amount-of-guests.233649/ - check out the cloudflare rules by @Anthony Parsons or implement something in front of the forum server such as a proof of work challenge (anubis waf).

A quick stopgap in the meantime is to temporarily restrict what guests can do (all methods of searching) or see (restrict thread view content). Yes, that'll hurt your short term SEO, but it'll blueball the ai-scraper botnets quickly while returning your server to being very quick.

 

[nodle]

Might want to look into setting up XenForo's guest page caching so your site won't get hammered so much.

Cache | XenForo Documentation

For larger XenForo installations, it can be advantageous to define a cache in order to save on processing time and database queries.

docs.xenforo.com

Also, you might want to look into Cloudflare if you're not already behind it.

 

[CedricV]

Do CDNs improve this kinda stuff? Like cloudfront.

Sure does.

Put everything behind Cloudflare if it isn't already, but I'd recommend keeping Rocket Loader disabled, as it can cause issues with JavaScript-heavy websites.

If you're running a VPS, it's also worth optimizing things like PHP-FPM pools, OPcache, Redis or other caching solutions, and your web server configuration. Even a few small tweaks can make a noticeable difference in performance.

 

[BrettC]

Do CDNs improve this kinda stuff? Like cloudfront.

If by Cloudfront, you're referring to AWS's S3+Cloudfront stuff for static content hosting, yes - that is one method to greatly lessen server disk/cpu i/o load. Offloading static content from your actual server to a CDN is more or less the optimal and preferred way for things like that.

If you actually meant Cloudflare, not of the AWS ecosystem, Cloudflare can also do what AWS's S3+Cloudfront with their R2 offering, but many folks have been iffy on its support/ease of implementation/usage.

However, the bonus of Cloudflare is that they don't cost an arm and a leg unlike AWS at scale for their WAF support and tools.