Slow Load on Certain Pages

[mikeydtkd]

Website with Cloudflare on is acting slow with certain elements. I’m using a Xenforo website, and when trying to login, check alerts, or click links from the sidebar, it takes forever to load.

I have Argo on
HTTPS
HSTS
and some other settings. Main tabs work fine, just when logging in or out from a new browser tab

[mikeydtkd]

So, running a XenForo website, on a LiteSpeed Server. I switched to Cloudflare for security and SPEED. When the website is in DNS Only, it loads perfectly fine. However, when its switched to Proxy it takes a while to load logins and latests posts links.

As of right now the website is on DNS Only because the load times are atrocious. I’ve attempted to turn off all setting as far as website optimization, and network, and am losing faith on what to do next. Any ideas?

[eva2000]

Pagespeed is relative so if your origin web server is located further away from Cloudflare Edge server/visitor location, then page speed and round trip times will be slower. If you web host origin server is closer to your visitors and test location, then it will be faster.

This is due to Cloudflare not caching HTML content by default (see below). This means your dynamically generated HTML content will be served from origin as it is not cached. So how fast a page is will be determined by your origin web server/php processor speed. So tuning and optimising your origin server will help.

So for optimal speed, you want your origin real web server to be hosted in a location closest to your majority traffic visitors and then put Cloudflare in front. For instance, my forums has 50% US visitors 40% Asian visitors and 10% Oceania. So my optimal geographic location for my origin is US West Coast as it sits in middle of US, Europe and Asian so equal round trip times for majority of visitors.

Cloudflare cache certain static content https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-Which-file-extensions-does-Cloudflare-cache-for-static-content- but not dynamic/static generated html itself by default. But you can tell Cloudflare to cache dynamic/static generated html content to some extent depending on Cloudflare plan you’re on via cache everything page rule or use Cloudflare Workers with custom cache everything for guest visitors only. But have to be careful to only do this for static html content and not dynamic html content (otherwise you would cache private logged in user content).

• How do I cache static HTML?
• How Do I Tell Cloudflare What to Cache?
• Caching Anonymous Page Views on CF Business plan you can properly distinguish between logged in users versus guests so tell Cloudflare via bypass cache on cookie page rules to only cache for guests the dynamic/static generated html content and bypass cache for logged in users. You can also do this to some extent via CF Workers. Then on CF Business plan you have access to Railgun which allows you to accelerate dynamic generated html content for the logged in users Railgun™. Then there’s also Argo for optimising the routing to your origin as well Argo Smart Routing | Traffic Acceleration

I’d test your web site with/without CF via 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 test and reports those additional Google focused pagespeed metrics.

Share your WPT result urls for both with/without CF with us.

I wrote a guide for my users which maybe useful to you as well on my forums at https://community.centminmod.com/threads/how-to-use-webpagetest-org-for-page-load-speed-testing.13859/ (yes using Xenforo myself )

[eva2000]

Also ensure Litespeed web server is latest version and doesn’t have any bugs i.e. Taking 10 secs to load the root folder while on litespeed and cloudflare | XenForo community