It worked without downtime. But I am having another issue, Cloudflare seems to have slown my website down dramatically. My scores used to be 95/90 on google and 95/95 on GTmetrix. Currently getting 85/83 on Google and 93/78 on GTMetrix.
Don’t just focus on the reported score but the underlying report metric/numbers for the issues they highlight as you can have a site with lower reported score still being faster page load wise than a higher reported score site still. For GTmetrix Yslow you would have one where they don’t recognise Cloudflare as a CDN so need to manually add your domain name to CDN list.
Also for page load speed that matters to Google/SEO, use webpagetest.org as they have alot of geographic test locations and allow you to test real mobile devices and different browser clients and connection speeds and with Google Lighthouse report focus on metrics that Google looks for that is first contentful paint, document content load time and speedindex or perceived visual render time above fold. I wrote a guide for my users which maybe useful to you as well https://community.centminmod.com/threads/how-to-use-webpagetest-org-for-page-load-speed-testing.13859/
The situation prior I had no CDN but my scores were near perfect, currently I have the Cloudflare CDN it is showing on GTMetrix as a 70. I see a couple highlighted issues with my live chat on webpage test but that was already there prior anyways.
When I had a GoDaddy CDN testing when I was building the site it did nothing but increase my scores.
GTMetrix allows you to compare 2 results so if you have a registered GTMetrix account you can look up result history to compare 2 results for before/after Cloudflare.
I don’t have an account so I can’t see any other comparisons passed the last one. But I’ve been checking my website regularly since it’s still going through updates and it has never been below 95/89 on google and 90+/90+ on GTmetrix. Until I directed myself to Cloudflare.
You can take a look here: www.northjewellery.com the results vary from minute to minute.
I highly recommend you register a free GTMetrix account, you can look back to over 1 years worth of results to compare against ! Very useful 
Are you testing non-https or https version of your site as GTMetrix will show the redirect as part of non-https test.
Also GTMetrix there will be some various between runs due to GTMetrix’s test server location work load and utilisation - when some locations for GTMetrix are busy and queued up etc.
Doing a GTMetrix test of your https version i see YSLOW reports alot of 3rd party code having no expire headers, Cloudflare can’t do anything about that and well it should of reported same without Cloudflare too
I suggest you use http://webpagetest.org/ for properly page load speed evaluations instead. GTMetrix is useful to get the recommendations done but just ignore the scores and focus on metric numbers etc
Yeah but these were unsolved issues before installing Cloudflare. I still had a near perfect score.
Can I turn off Cloudflare simply by clicking the list of yellow clouds in the dashboard? How long will this take to take effect if yes?
I should note that the page speed has never gone over 5 seconds it’s now reaching 7 seconds.
I’d only turn off Cloudflare if you don’t mind leaking your server origin real IP address. Otherwise I wouldn’t turn it off as leaked IP means folks can access and bypass Cloudflare and hit your real server directly.
With webpagetest.org it allows you in advance options to define a domain to IP pairing so you can set it to your real server IP to test pagespeed without having to turn off Cloudflare via setDNS option https://sites.google.com/a/webpagetest.org/docs/using-webpagetest/scripting#TOC-setDns
example webpagetest run in dulles, va via cable speed profile for chrome browser for your site WebPageTest Test - Running web page performance and optimization tests...
on the waterwall i see wp-admin requests ? you using Cloudflare cache everything rule on domain.com/* ?
10th request for js is massive too
and
I don’t know, this is out of my reading experience it’s going to take time to adsorb it all.
For diagnosing admin-ajax.php slowest Diagnosing admin-ajax.php Slow Responses in WordPress - KeyCDN and How to find which plugin calls admin-ajax.php - WP Rocket Knowledge Base
The ones that matter are http://www.webpagetest.org/ and https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
The others are OK for seeing what to improve, but their scores aren’t something to stress over.
1 Like
Most likely the result of a concatenation plugin.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 31 days. New replies are no longer allowed.