I'm building a new e-shop for a client and the performance is quite poor, especially the home page first load. I have enabled production mode, minimized CSS and JS, and i'm using Cloudflare free CDN plan, and I have seen a 100% speed boost, but I could surely appreciate dropping the first load to ~3 secs.
You have to run Magento with Varnish cache setup on the server. It's super fast with Varnish and super slow without. All our clients stores have 0.2-0.4s first byte time which would be impossible without Varnish.
Anton Pachkine @ magento2.hosting : Magento Small Business Package.
