Ask HN: How do I approach improving website latency?

Hello,<p>I recently put together a side project using GCP on a MEAN stack. It involves a load-balancer performing ssl-termination, then routing to a small instance, which then returns static assets. Once the static assets are received, the browser will render the html and make another call to the backend, which then loads some data from a managed mongoDB stack and returns that data to be rendered as well.<p>The load time for the website is ~15 seconds total, the first half of which being for the initial call involving only static assets. I am trying to figure out why it is so slow but am having trouble doing so.<p>The instance is in Iowa (us-central1) while I am in Seattle. I tried only serving plain html&#x2F;css in the initial call, but load time was still terrible.<p>I am not sure where I should focus my investigation, or if this is to be expected for an instance so far away, and if I just need to have an instance closer to me. Let me know what you think