Totally Lost: Why Isn't My CDN Improving Page Load Times for My Geo-Directory Listings?

Hi everyone, I'm a complete newbie here and still grappling with page load times for my online directory, following up on a previous discussion. My "country codes online directory" (think lots of geo-specific listings) is still painfully slow, especially for users geographically distant from my main server. The core issue seems to be initial server response and dynamic content delivery.

Based on advice to improve page load times and address geographical latency, I decided to implement a CDN (e.g., Cloudflare). I've tried to configure it for caching static assets and even experimented with some full-page caching rules, thinking it would distribute my site faster. To my confusion, after implementing the CDN, I haven't seen the dramatic improvement I expected. While static assets might be faster, the Time To First Byte (TTFB) remains high, and the overall load time for pages with dynamic "geo-directory listings" data hasn't really changed for distant users. It feels like the CDN isn't truly kicking in for the main content. I'm really trying to get this right for optimal web directory optimization, but I feel like I'm hitting a wall.

Am I completely misunderstanding how CDNs should be configured for a site with dynamic content like a geo-directory? Are there specific CDN settings or strategies I should be looking into to truly boost CDN performance for pages that pull data from a database? Could the bottleneck still be my origin server's database queries or its response time even with a CDN in front? How can I diagnose this effectively? Any "for dummies" advice on making a CDN actually work wonders for a beginner building a directory site would be incredibly appreciated!

Really hoping some experts can shed light on what I'm doing wrong.