I am fairly new to the server and hosting side of websites, so I may just be missing something simple… but I have not been able to find an answer to my issues doing a few hours of research.
My load time was under 1 second, and now depending on the page are up to around 5 seconds. I have tried disabling Cloudflare to see if it was my hosting provider (GoDaddy), but with CF disabled my page load speed goes back to under 1 second - which leads me to believe that it is a Cloudflare issue. I have another website on CF and it loads perfectly fine no issues.
I have a link for the webage test before and after.
Cloudflare Enabled:
Cloudflare Disabled:
(the disabled doesn’t tell much because with CF disabled I have no SSL and the test comes up with insecure address warning).
Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am not an expert in this stuff. I am starting Google Ads strategy this week for work but my quality score is being greatly diminished because of horrendous load times, and I cant just disable Cloudflare and go no SSL because the bounce rate is almost 100% w/ no active SSL.
Then you should install SSL at the origin. Cloudflare is not a band-aid for broken sites.
As it stands, the slowest part of your site is the page HTML itself since Cloudflare has to fetch that from the origin. That takes about 1 second for me. Everything else is super fast once cached by Cloudflare. That tells me you’re probably on a shared hosting plan at GoDaddy which isn’t one of their faster hosting options.
One option to speed up the homepage is a Page Rule to Match: southpointehealthcare.com/ and add a Cache Level setting of “Cache Everything” with Edge Cache TTL of 1 day. Just be aware the Cloudflare will cache the first visit to that page, so if you browse it in Admin mode, the next visitor(s) will see any special Admin features that show on your screen. Though they can’t do any admin tasks because they haven’t logged in as an admin.
In the Caching options section, you can bump up Browser Cache TTL to 1 month (or more) and that should take care of the F for CDN.
I will try setting up the “Cache Everything” as suggested.
I understand your point, but my main reason for using CF was the SSL Cert as GoDaddy makes you pay like $70 (outrageous). I was just handed down this site and it has not been updated in years (themes, plugins, back end updates) - so it is in pretty bad shape from that view. This website is one of the last on my list (4 total) because it serves its purpose and shockingly is in better shape than the others. I only encountered a functional problem once getting on CF… I know CF is advertised as speeding up your website but that is not the reason I am using it.
I will implement the changes you have recommended and let you know how it goes.