Hello,
I signed up to Cloudflare from a the dreamhost cpanel , yesterday. My eCommerce site is hosted by dreamhost and I already have SSL setup I picked the 9.99 a month package and made a account.
My primary reason for doing this was to improve my website loading speed for SEO. When I test my site today , my scoring is same as it was before I signed up to Cloudflare. I am not sure what I need to change to improve the speed. On the speed tab in the Cloudflare website I checked all of the Auto Minify check boxes. I selected “lossy” for the polish option. I enabled Brotli and Mirage. Rocket Loader is set to automatic.
On the DNS tab I was told I would have to add the Cloudflare CNAME to the DNS via the dreamhost website , but it seems they did it for me automatically as it now shows up under the Non-editable records for the DNS on the dreamhost site.
I also noticed that the Verification TXT Record For CNAME Setup on the DNS tab is empty , is this normal because Dreamhost is taking care of things ? Or is this something I must add ?
Please help me get started so I can enjoy the speed ups from using Cloudflare CDN.
Looking at your DNS records, only the www is pointed to Cloudflare. The root zone record isn’t (which makes sense because in a CNAME setup through Dreamhost it can’t be). Unfortunately at the moment most of the assets on your site are being loaded via absolute URLs using the root, which means those assets aren’t being proxied or cached by Cloudflare.
If you do these DNS queries with your domain you’ll see what I mean in terms of the addresses being different.
actually to be honest , I have no idea where to change that . Can it be done from the dreamhost cpanel ? how do I change the mapping on the static asset for missingcord.com ? Is that the ip address i purchased for it at dreamhost ? Do I add something to the dns records for missingcord ?
Okay I talked to dreamhost support and they told me to change the links on my site to use www and that this was the cause of the issue. So I did via my sites files. Do i need to do anything else to begin getting the site cached correctly so this can work right ?
Site appears to be loading through Cloudflare and using webpagetest.org I can see the download of assets is now happening in parallel, which indicates http2 is being used (which is good) and the cf-cache-status is hit. The origin is still a bit slow to respond, if you’re on a shared plan this is one of those instances where having a dedicated server might be helpful, but first I would look at some of the performance turning recommendations for your ecommerce platform.
No worries. I’ve used DreamHost (cheapest plan) for years and I know figuring out WTH Cloudflare is doing (or not) can be a challenge, especially when it’s brand new to you.