Free vs Pro Speed

Website, Application, Performance
1

I read that pro and free does not have speed changes.
My issue is that i have two eshops.
Both at the same server in Hetzner, both opencart 3 with journal theme.
Both have the exact same setup, but the one running at the free version feels a lot slower and gets way worse results at gt metrix than the one in pro.

The funny thing is that the one in the free version looks like it is not cached at all.
GTmetrix waterfall show that initial response from the server is 3 secs!!!
Do i have to upgrade to pro, in order to have descent speed?

2

You read correctly…with the caveat that it’s under the same circumstances (edge node, and Cloudflare settings)

You shouldn’t have to. If you want closer inspection, post the URLs and we can take a look.

2 Likes
3

PRO vs FREE might have some slight benefits on speed but it is not advertised as an actual feature, if that’s your main reason to upgrade, don’t do it.

Unless you are running APO or more page rules/etc the differences are likely slim.

4

Thank you guys.
My only reason to upgrade is he speed.
I am ok with the 3 rules.
My sites are
Uride.Gr
Motohub.Gr
It seems that motohub does not deliver cached pages.

5

You are correct, and that’s Cloudflare’s default setting. It looks like Uride has a Cache Everything page rule.

6

Do you know how I can correct, so motohub will deliver cached pages?
If you remember, a few days ago I asked Why my Mobile and desktop sites had an issue.
You told me that it had a cache everything option. I removed it and it corrected the problem.
But now it does not deliver any cached pages.
What option should I use?

7

Ah, I do recall that now. Cache Everything is risky on dynamic sites, especially eCommerce, as you don’t want to cache someone else’s shopping cart, etc.

That’s why I asked if you had a Business or Enterprise plan. With those, you can safely do a Cache Everything because you can bypass cache for cookies, like shopping carts and logged in users. This is what APO does, but that’s only for WordPress sites.

You can use Cloudflare Workers to do this, and a Workers plan runs about $5/month for your entire account, so that would cover both sites. If you know which cookies your site(s) use, you can add them into the Worker to bypass cache for shoppers and logged in users.

2 Likes
8

I have each site at different account. And I have a rule to exclude shopping cart.
I Will check tomorrow from my pc about workers and Will let you know!
Thank you for your help.

9

As you discovered in that other thread, now that I read through it again, Cache Everything messes up your mobile view. I no longer think the Bypass on Cookies is suitable due to the issue in your other thread. The Worker doesn’t differentiate between Mobile and Desktop view.

My comment on the Responsive site still stands. I don’t think it’s responsive if different devices get different content. If you need this and Cache Everything, you may have to put the mobile version into its own subdomain, like m.example.com, and then you can use Cache Everything.

10

I don’t know how to do a mobile version at m.example.com but i did some other changes and it seems that it is working.
I have a cache everything, with a rule to exclude the shopping cart and i changed the settings from the journal to load the menu different at mobile/tablet and desktop versions.
It seems that it is working and it is caching.
Thank you for your help!

1 Like
11

Hi, I hope I’m not late for the party.

I’m a developer specialising in speed and worked extensively with Cloudflare. In my opinion, you’re asking the wrong question because you don’t understand how things work. Let me explain.
So major flaw in your question is:

GTmetrix waterfall show that initial response from the server is 3 secs!!!

A website’s initial response (TTFB) depends on the server because the server is generating HTML. And what influences how long TTFB will take? First, it’s a distance from a user to the server and then how the website has been built. When it comes to how the website has been built is most important how many lines of code it has to process, what’s server’s CPU single-thread performance, CPU load, how quickly gets data from the database, and a few more but these are most important.
I really hope you understand on this point that there is an issue with your server or how the website has been built, right? Now, to solve this, you’re trying to fix this by adding a CDN. OK, let’s talk about CDN and Cloudflare

Cloudlfare is a CDN, DDOS mitigation and Firewall mainly, it can help a bit with its optimization features like mirage and rocket loader but it’s not a silver bullet. Cloudflare’s optimization it’s just a little extra to its core purpose of Content Delivery Network. And actually, they never said: “However your website is made, using Cloudflare PRO will make it really fast”. So when it comes to TTFB, Cloudflare can only help with static pages and has to be set that way. If your website is an e-shop, it’s probably dynamic and full-page caching may cause more harm than good. And then if you solve enabling full-page caching for a visitor, when he/she put’s anything to the cart, a full-page cache must be turned off and you’re where you been.

And when we’re talking about speed, TTFB is just one part, font-end code (HTML, images, fonts CSS and especially JS size) is as much important as fast TTFB. JS is the main killer really because it’s overused and it’s very hard to do anything about it. Everything else is relatively easy to optimise. So even if you have 1ms TTFB, if your front-end need to load 4MB of JS to render the website, you still have a slow website, and Cloudflare or any other service won’t help.

So I hope you understand that you made a wrong assumption on what Cloudflare can and can’t do for you. It’s a tool, works very very well for some cases, good for others and there are cases that it doesn’t help at all.

Now, why do slow websites exist? My observation is that slow websites haven’t been planned to be fast in the first place. Speed wasn’t on the top of the list of requirements when the building process has started. And then, who did it, most probably had no previous experience and training building fast websites.

So what to do about it? The best, long term solution is to rebuild from scratch with speed as a top priority. Anything that would significantly interfere with the speed cannot be used. In other words, instead of fixing a large engine to Ford Fiesta, a better solution is to build Formula 1 from the very beginning.

I hope that helped.

1 Like
12

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