My speed has not changed since joining cloudflare

Performance
#1

Hi

I have joined cloudflare but my site speed has not changed. it is still loading around 3.3 seconds

Is there anything i am doing wrong

#2

Your expectations on CloudFlare are wrong.
Also you say your site-speed has not been improved but you do not provide a test BEFORE you have been routed through CloudFlare.

Your site itself is just very very un-optimized and like expected a WordPress page. WordPress pages are like 99% using some Themes for $60 which are very very flexible, but never optimized. Thats why I hate WordPress, but these are just my 2cents.

So if you really wanna get some help. Go and:

  1. ā€œPause CloudFlareā€
  2. Clear ALL Cache (in CloudFlare)
  3. run the test again with CloudFlare being paused
  4. provide the new test without CloudFlare to us

Then we can take a look into both speedtests and inspect them.

If you test your site please run the test at least twice! This you should do due to the fact, that CloudFlare is no real CDN but a proxyCDN which warms up cache by serving it. Means: first calls always land in ā€œcf-cache-status: EXPIREDā€ or ā€œcf-cache-status: MISSā€.

But to make this clear: its not CloudFlares fault that your site is not performing well. It can just ā€œimproveā€ it. It cant perform magic and make a Manta as fast as a Ferrari :wink:

3 Likes
#3

Hi, i have ran lots of tests before cloudflare and once i have had it installed and the results are the same, and that is what i said. i did use many year ago joomla, but developers i spoke to said wordpress was much better.

i will pause cloudflare now and do the test again.

#4

here is the test with cloudflare on pause

here are the results with cloudflare installed

any help and advice would be great

#5

I run your test again while CloudFlare was paused and it now rankes like this:
:grey: Test1

:orange: Test1


:orange: Test2

Summary:
Without CloudFlare Test 1: 4.2s
With CloudFlare Test 1: 3.3s
With CloudFlare Test 2: 2.8s (always run twice with Cloudflare!)

But Speed isnt everything, it is also very important how your page will be ranked in google. There also it seems to perform better with CloudFlare.
Anyway: even if CloudFlare is speeding your site up it will not be improved by much, due to the bad template and due to the fact that modern standards are not getting used on your Website.

Indeed on the test you proved it was faster without CloudFlare, but it seems to be very inconsistent as i ahve meassured about 4.0s without CloudFlare.

Like I said: its not CloudFlares fault, but as you already created this thread I will give you some hints:

PCITURES & IMAGES:

  1. implement webp pictures (natively in DOM and if possible not by CF dynamically)
  2. do not use images/icons/svg/jpg/png implemented as ā€œBackgroundimageā€ or defined by CSS
  3. use <picture> tags and overload them with responive images.
  4. use <picture> tags and overload them with different formats (WEBP/HEIC/JP2) and native Images (PNG/JPG) as fallback
  5. lazyload Images. (no this is currently not working correct for you, as you can see in the waterfall at GTMetrix)
  6. scale images to the size they will be displayed
  7. optimize Images natively and losslessly
  8. prevent inline base64 images if its JPG or PNG and bigger then 4kb

CSS & JS

  1. combine ALL css files into one big file
  2. combine ALL js files into one big file
  3. prevent inline JS (if possible), it most probably can be added to the combined file
  4. compress the big css file at highest level (CloudFlare is doing this for you)
  5. compress the big js file at highest level (CloudFlare is doing this for you)
    (hint: compression get better and better the bigger the files)
  6. put CSS into header
  7. put JS right before closing tag.
  8. remove unused css
    9 remove unused js

FONTS:

  1. prevent too many fonts. Try to go with just 1-2 fonts. You actually use 9 different fonts, which are ALL producing renderblocking.
  2. implement font-display correct for each font.
  3. remove unused fonts
  4. optimize fonts natively and losslessly
  5. compress fonts

DNS:

  1. prevent too many external DNS lookups
  2. combine files if possible to prevent requests

LOADINGPRDER:
explains itself

Well ā€¦ there are so much things to do. I would recommend to start with optimizing pictures which will gain you the most of it combined with correct lazyload and then loadingorder and CSS & JS

so:

  1. Pictures & LazyLoad
  2. CSS/JS & LoadingOrder

Have fun!

2 Likes
GT Metrix and PageSpeed Insights with Cloudflare APO + CDN
#6

Also: LazyLoad things like ā€œAdsā€. But do it even more aggressively!
Just load them if:

  1. EVERYTHING is fninshed AND used interacts (save mode)
  2. EVERYTHING is fninshed

Additional tipp:

  1. if you use webp with a origin-server-internall rewriteruel webp files will be cached on URLs with ā€œ*.jpgā€ or ā€œ*.pngā€ aswell, so this can break pictures for iOS devices which not all supports webp in safari.
    Dont know if you have implemented it this way, but if: dont do this

Example: https://www.in2town.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/life-and-style-magazine-UK.png

Notics: iOS 14 devices should natively support WEBP => SOURCE

.

ALL these have just been a few things you should care about, this was by far not everything. So just try to google and find out what you can do better, or use Google PageSpeed Insights which is telling you exactly what should be improved.

#7

Also to your ā€œproblemā€ about "Cloudflare is not improving your speed.
CloudFlare will keep the speed (for static files) about the same for every location on this world. If you let them be served from your origin server they have to take much longer routes if the request comes from more far away then London. So CloudFlare is not just speeding up your site by a bit (just a bit due to the bad optimizationlevel) but also it keeps this optimization worldwide.

I would not leave CloudFlare if I would be you. And as soon as you combine your CSS & JS files CloudFlares compression (Brotli lvl 11 I think) will come into the game and compresses your CSS and JS files even more.

But most WordPress users just want to install a ā€œPluginā€ for about $20 to ā€˜somehowā€™ gain again a bit more performance and having the problems concealed instead of solving them natively

4 Likes
#8

Hi, thank you for that. Can you bare with me as i am not technical, i am the least technical person you will come across but i am trying to learn. I will not leave cloudflare but i need to learn how to sort things out. so i will go things one by one

1 Like
#9

Iā€™m sorry but as this is not a ā€œtechnical SEOā€ forum this would not be related to CloudFlare in any way.
I have provided you with the biggest problems of your website. Just google how to implement them. Some of these things <picture> Tag for example is sometimes not solvable in some wordpress themes as they are not ready for this.

1 Like
#10

  1. i have chosen the option for images on cloudflare: implement webp pictures (natively in DOM and if possible not by CF dynamically). i think this is correct. i have polish put on, with lossy webp

  2. sorry i do not know what this means

  3. i do not understand what this mens

  4. are you saying new images i install i should instead of using jpg i should use webp. and do i have to find a way of changing all the old images like this

  5. i have lazyload switch on with my newspaper theme. not sure why it is not working properly so i will need to contact the theme developers. which i will do now. it will take them about four days to respond

  6. i am using photoshop to have the images displayed at the correct size. the only times they are not showing at the correct size is the thumbnails and not sure how to sort that out

  7. how can i do that

  8. can you offer advice on that

thank you for everything

#11

so where can i go to try and get this information

#12

To fully optimise you need to optimize 3 segments.

  1. segment 1 - connection between visitor and CF edge server i.e. CDN cache, WAF, Firewall, Page Rules, Mirage, Polish webP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, CF Workers (i.e. custom/advanced caching) etc
  2. segment 2 - connection between CF edge server and your origin i.e. Argo, Railgun & Full SSL/ECDSA SSL certificates, pre-compressed asset served from origin
  3. segment 3 - your origin serverā€™s performance/optimisations i.e. web server, PHP, MySQL server optimisations and server hardware specs.

Cloudflare can only help for segments 1 & 2 for cached guest/non-logged based visitors will easily scale.

GTMetrix just switched to using Google Lighthouse v6 for metrics so same underlying metrics as Google Page Speed Insights. So you might want to read my outlined guide at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/google-page-speed-insights-and-google-core-web-vital-metrics.20735/ as the order and how you load your assets/theme is something Cloudflare canā€™t help you with as that is up to you.

Google PageSpeed Insights uses Google Lighthouse v6 API to test Googleā€™s page experience signal new Core Web Vitals metrics for both test lab and real world field data test (via Chome User Experience Report - CRuX) of your siteā€™s theme/layout as well and how itā€™s put together. Your decisions on what theme, layout and number of 3rd party requests/ads you place on your sitesā€™ pages and the order of loading those assets will impact the page speed metrics measured.

The gist of Googleā€™s user page experience signal measurements is that if you have a lot of javascript loading on your page, it will impact a users page loading experience and thus youā€™d lower your scores. The less javascript you have on a page, the better the user page experience.

3 Likes
#13

one thing i have noticed. if you look at this link, when i have cloudflare turned off it is all As, when i have it turned on it shows Compress components with gzip comes up with F, and Use cookie-free domains F. Is there a readon for that. do i have a conflict going on here with cloudflare.

#14

Because Cloudlare generally uses Brotli, which is better, but that test doesnā€™t check that.

Cloudflare cookies are very efficient, and that test hates cookies.

1 Like
#15

Yep, most people using WordPress have no idea about web development and speed. Everybody thinks they can make a website, but there is a big difference between a website and a good website.

2 Likes
#16

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