Argo Smart Routing
Cloudflare's new Argo Smart Routing feature was released to improve Page Speed by using Cloudflare's large network to find faster routes to the origin server. This results in faster load times, especially for locations further away from the origin server. If you want to know more about Argo, read this recent blog post.
Improves Transit Between Cloudflare and your Origin Server
One important thing to know here is that the biggest performance gains will be had for visitors to Data Centers that are farthest from your Origin server.
This improvement won't be reflected in Ping or Traceroute. Instead, it will be more apparent to visitors of your site, and with speed testing such as Webpagetest, Pingdom or Google Pagespeed Insights.
Benchmarking Argo
Argo analytics are available in the Analytics app in the dashboard. You can also run speed tests from a variety of free websites to get a different perspective on the performance benefits of Argo Smart Routing.
For this example, we used the speed test at Pingdom, which allows you to select different regions to test from. This is important because the performance gains vary depending on the location of the origin server.
Results are Impressive
Before:
After:
Full Results
| Location | Before Argo | After Argo |
| San Jose, California, USA | 2.56 s | 900 ms |
| Melbourne, Australia | 3.88 s | 2.28 s |
| Stockholm, Sweden | 2.63 s | 1.89 s |
| Dallas, Texas, USA | 1.49 s | 1.14 s |