Help for total newbie

Getting Started
#1

Hi there.

Geography
Geography2912×1724 434 KB

I hope this question doesn’t sound completely stupid (I’m a beginner with a limited understanding of websites) and that someone can explain it to me.

I made my own site for my one-woman little business and having just transferred from Godaddy to Siteground I’m struggling a bit to get things set up.

I’ve enabled the free Cloudflare option that they offer. I’m subscribed to weekly updates from fastorslow.com and several that I’ve received since switching to Siteground have shown good reports from Europe (I’m hosted the UK) but much slower from other places in the world. The report is worse than when I was with Godaddy.

I’m not sure I’m interpreting this tool correctly and wondered if someone could take a look for me Website Speed Test from 17 Locations for www.annabregmanportraits.co.uk/ Looking at the ‘geography’ section the map seems to show that wherever the website is profiled from the files look to be being served from either the UK, US or Japan. Is that what you’d expect to see when using Cloudflare? Should it not show data being sent much more locally?

Many thanks for your help

Anna

Slow loading in Far East/Australia
#2

There are some topics regarding some issues others have had having a combination of Siteground and Cloudflare. Have you tried using a search :search: option to find some help if so?

There are a lot of options regarding the Page Speed and Optimization at Cloudflare (Minify, cache, Rocket Loader and even much more on Pro plan or higher one like Mirage, Polish, etc.).

Maybe a good start:

#3

Welcome to cloudflare!
For tips on getting started visit support.cloudflare.com or Getting Started with Cloudflare – Cloudflare Help Center you can find answers to many questions in the cloudflare support page!

#4

Thanks very much both. Can I just ask, looking at that report does it seem like my Cloudflare is actually enabled and working?

#5

Your domain should have the Cloudflare nameservers if you added your Website to Cloudflare. Sometimes, due to DNS propagation it needs 24 hours to apply the changes.

Moreover, you would see something similar like this at your Cloudflare Dashboard:

success

And, you would also get an e-mail notification that your Website has been successfully added to your Cloudflare account.

Furthermore, here are few good articles to get you introduce and understand the available features from Cloudflare:

#6

Hi there,

I have a complete beginner’s question as my knowledge of both websites and CDNs are pretty limited.

I recently transferred my website to Siteground hosting and enabled the free Cloudflare that comes with it. I’m hosted in the UK. My customers are from all round the world.

When using various online tools to check how fast my site is loading from around the world I’m finding that it usually loads pretty fast from Europe, but almost always takes double the time or even more to load in places furthest away from me such as the Far East - so for example it might load in 1.3s from London but appears to take 3.7 from Tokyo or up to 5s from Sydney. The tools I’ve used have been things like uptrends.com, keycdn.com or fastorslow.com and they all indicate the same trend

I thought the whole point of a CDN was to serve content much more locally, so why does the site load so much slower when further away from Europe or the US?

Hope someone patient can explain it to me!
Many thanks
Anna

#7

It is likely slower at those locations because Cloudflare does not have your website cached there - so it will need to retrieve it from your origin. Subsequent requests should be cached (given you have correctly setup caching for your website).

I was routed to Japan when I visited your site, and when I refreshed it was indeed cached correctly and loaded quite quickly

#8

Many thanks…so does that mean it requires at least one visitor from that country/region to visit the site, and after that it will serve the cached view to anyone else in the same location?

#9

That’s somewhat correct. But each region has several caches, so visitors near there might not hit the same server each time. It does take a few visits to get consistent cache HITs. But if there aren’t return visits within several hours, the file gets dropped from the cache.

Remember that this only applies to static files, such as images, CSS, and JS. The page text itself is not cached by default and has to be grabbed from your server each time. But since you’re running WordPress, you can use APO ($5/month on Free plans, but included in Paid plans).

#10

Many thanks to you both for explaining it. Would APO work with the Siteground Cloudflare?

#11

If you’re using Siteground’s Cloudflare integration, you would have to see if Optimized Delivery (Automated Platform Optimization) is available in your Speed → Optimization settings.

#12

Many thanks! Appreciate the help

1 Like
#13

Are the Australia POPs still heavily restricted in 2021? I might just ignore any perf statistics from Australia if CF & telco/last mile Australia ISPs still have very limited peering.

see Does it matter how close my origin (Sydney, AU) is to my USA Cloudflare nameservers on FREE plan in AUS (doesn't use Aussie PoPs)? - #5 by stefan.caliaro

#14

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