Was it a coincidence that we saw such a massive drop within weeks of migrating from a subfolder to a subdomain. Quite possibly, but look at from my point of view. What did I change, what can I control (since I can’t control what google do). I’m desperate to reverse the trend, if the subfolder makes it worse we’ll revert to a subdomain. Yes, I know google have stated it makes no difference, but then people have cited tests that dispute that claim, and without any evidence of other factors that would have caused this on our site, I’m skeptical at best.
It’s not proxying through DNN, it’s proxying through IIS. And our TTFB is no worse than these forums :
Score - 29
Pagespeed for a topic on our forums
Score - 30
I have no doubt that discourse is more crawler friendly, it’s more everything compared to our old forums 