I have been using Cloudflare for a while, however I am having an issue where I am getting significantly increased page loading times measured both on Google PageSpeed Insights and on Google Chrome.
As you can see, there’s a 45% decrease in Google PageSpeed Insights score, but in addition the Google Chrome loading times are over twice as long!
This is a drastic performance hit. I really like using Cloudflare but I can’t afford to take such a drastic performance hit. I even went as far as setting up a staging subdomain on the same server with the same content, but opted to not have that proxied. The results consistently replicable.
Your site has lots of large images which will be a big hit for Lighthouse which usually runs on mobile devices/throttled connections, so you’d want to look into something like Image Resizing which allows you to do lossy/lossless compression with next-gen formats such as WebP/AVIF - which will massively reduce the file sizes. https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/
The aforementioned images are also the biggest killer for your Lighthouse scores.
In general, I’d have a look through the following tabs in your zone on the dashboard (https://dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/:zone) and see what’s available to your plan and what you could enable, such as:
Speed → Optimization
Caching → Configuration / Tiered Cache
Network
There’s lots of options in there for you to get better compression, cache hit ratios, lower file sizes and a host of other things. I’d recommend something like https://webpagetest.org as opposed to Lighthouse whilst you’re still squeezing performance out of your website since it gives a lot more ‘here’s how you could get better’ rather than ‘here’s what you’re doing wrong’ - I’ve ran a test on your site at ts.marketing : Chro...irginia USA - EC2 - WebPageTest Optimization Check Results
Hi, thank you for your post. I have fixed the caching issue but the still doesn’t explain why Cloudflare proxy is Significantly slower than not proxied. What gives?
