After we started using Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) we noticed that it indeed improves the perfomance/speed of our website. Great! The website was having issues because of a few items on the frontpage like Trustpilot widget slowing it down a lot. That has now improved, we went from a load time of >2.5~3s <1.2~1.4s. That’s a huge improvement.
However we did noticed there’s an influence on some other stuff that is not that cool. For example, on the same domain we host ninja-invoice (in a folder like domain.com/ninjainvoice) and another application we wrote ourselves.
After activating Automatic Platform Optimization we, after some time, could no longer login to these programs unless we bypassed it using a different domain also pointing to the same website or clearing the cache at Cloudflare.
I can understand how this was caused. APO, at the moment, doesn’t “see” that /ninjainvoice/* doesn’t belong to the wordpress installation. It just caches everyting on a domain.
So we exluded it using the pagerules. Hopefully that will work well. However, this should be adressed I think - perhaps in the instructions somewhere or, if possible, in the APO itself. Since if people can’t discover what is going on, they will stop using it. And that would be a shame. Since it’s a great performance booster for sure!