I am looking to improve my Page Speed Insights Score and this was one of the reasons in coming over. It was suggested by my hosting provider to give it a try rather than running the module itself as it covered everything I was looking to get covered.
I am running the Pro Plan and so far I am like what I have seen and my score has increased and site is blatantly faster – just a few items that did not change.
Under Page Speed Insights
It still suggests compressing and reducing the image sizes; I have polish enabled (both Lossless and with WebP).
Leverage browser caching it says both my .js (60 minutes) and .jpgs (24 hours) need to be fixed. Strange as I have these setup as (access plus 1 month) and (access plus 1 week) under Apache and Cloudflare setup to Respect Existing Headers.
Eliminate render-blocking on 3 CSS files.
Should I still be fixing this locally on my server or is Cloudflare setup to manage all this for you? I did read under the help that running both Cloudflare and Mod Pagespeed would be redundant.
PageSpeed annoys me because of the Image Size demands. I used to score ok, but then they changed the scoring to encourage even more compression. I suspect they’re dinging you on .jpg files. It’s been a while since I’ve used the Pro Plan, but docs say Polish says you can set the mode to Lossy. Is this how you have it set?
For the browser caching, I’ve had to manually set them via .htaccess. It sounds like you did this.
Perhaps you have a conflicting setting at Cloudflare under the Caching tab (Browser Cache Expiration). I set mine to a month. And check for conflicting settings in Page Rules.
As for the Render Blocking CSS…good luck. I don’t think there’s a realistic way around that, but with HTTP/2, it shouldn’t be much of an issue.
You are bang on with the .jpg images – I was getting a perfect score until recently and noticed just a slight drop in positioning. Time to get this fixed before I drop more.
I have the Pro Plan and I have Polish with Lossless – should it be Lossy? I don’t want make the photos to come out looking bad. Be nice if they had a preview option to determine right choice. I also have WebP active and I don’t see those images at all anywhere. I use Chrome which supports that format and nothing.
The browser caching is set to respect my settings and I have the following rules. They should be following these rules and are not.
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 hour”
ExpiresByType text/javascript “access plus 1 month”
ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 1 week”
ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 week”
I just activated my first rule about 30 minutes ago. Which has no browser caching within it. Just caching of the files on their servers.
Should I run PageSpeed locally is what I am starting to wonder and just gone that route.
Go ahead and switch it to Lossy. It’s not messing with the images on your server…just what’s in the Cloudflare cache. If it looks back, change it back.
That’s disappointing about not seeing WebP. I don’t know what magic Cloudflare performs to swap them in.
I had this issue before. My issue is that the www.mydomain.com’s ip is on Cloudflare while the none www. version is on pair.
after changing the ip address, no 500 server errors so far.
When I install Cloudflare Pro with Polish (Lossy + Webp) and Mirage, I definitely see an immediate bump to my Google PageSpeed Insights scores.
Problem is that when I return after some time, and test, Google PageSpeed Insights again suggests that I need to do Image Optimizations.
After fiddling for a while (clearing Cloudflare cache, changing Polish settings, etc), I can typically get my good PageSpeed Insights scores to return, but I’m using this so that we can “set it and forget it”, not return every couple of weeks to make sure that my PageSpeed Insights scores are still in good shape.
What’s going on here? Why is it that Google is somehow receiving the original images from my server, rather than the optimized ones from Cloudflare.
This has happened to me quite a few times, for quite a few websites, so I’m really disappointed in these findings.
Hey there. I haven’t used Polish or Mirage so forgive my ignorance. Are you confident that your images are being cached for extended period of time? I’m unsure if there are specific cache settings related to the Polish/Mirage features or specific settings for edge cache TTL.
My server’s cache time for images should be 1 month. Assuming this is how long Cloudflare should cache them for. My Cloudflare setting for Browser Cache is only 4 hours, but per Cloudflare: “This expiration time is what Cloudflare will set unless longer time periods are specified at your web server.”
My mod_expires settings for images are as follows:
<FilesMatch “(?i).(gif|jpg|png|webp|bmp|ico|swf|flv)$”>
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 month”
Pagespeed Insights doesn’t complain about leveraging browser cache for images at all (unless the images are coming from a different domain).
Edit: I confirmed my browser cache settings with the following header: expires:Fri, 10 Nov 2017 15:50:14 GMT
Personally, I have the Browser Cache Expiration set to ‘Respect Existing Headers’ to ensure I have full control from my origin - maybe I am being overly cautious. But like your edit states it looks like your headers are being honored anyway, so that is probably moot.
Well, it was one idea anyway… hopefully those more familiar with Polish and Mirage will jump in with some more thoughts.
I’ve found that speed “scores” don’t accurately tell the big picture. Many times I have gotten my score to nearly 100% and the site is actually slower. I think this is because the scoring is based on “rules” and not “speed”. If you post the web page, we can make suggestions.