Notes on Hooking Up a Website With Cloudflare

Published on Sep 3, 2024, filed under development. (Share this post, e.g. on Mastodon or on Bluesky.)

As mentioned in my last episode of “Website Optimization Measures,” I played around with Cloudflare.

Superquick notes. Why? Happy if they help anyone. Also: Happy if I overlooked something and you can tell me what.

• My goal was to test whether Cloudflare could be an easy, elegant solution to improve global performance of my websites on shared hosting. (They are pretty optimized but TTFB is an issue.)

• I performed this test with Cloudflare’s free plan. (I would put money on the table, but if it could work for free, even better.)

• I tested with a dedicated, minimal test website hosted at DreamHost, and an established one hosted at ALL-INKL.

• First issue I observed was around redirects. It could be solved by adjusting certificate settings.

• Second though half an issue was that Cloudflare’s free-plan support is swearword. It’s non-existent. (I have a post come up that describes how this support philosophy can really f you up. “You,” that is both you as the user and you as the business.)

• Third issue was figuring out where and how to set up DNS entries. That wasn’t obvious (to me), but sure, these are to be set on Cloudflare’s end. (CNAME entries must not be proxied.)

• Results were odd (and it’s where my thinking may have been too lazy). I monitored the Speed Index of the two sites on five continents. In one case, Cloudflare led to a faster average Speed Index 5 times, and a slower one 4 times. In the other case, Cloudflare led to improvements in all cases. The improvements were up to 100 ms and 10%.

• Although I still haven’t taken the time to go through and understand the mixed results for that one domain, I’ve decided that the 10% saving was not worth the hoops to jump through to put Cloudflare in front of all domains, and to risk being without support, or on an expensive plan. (For now.)

• An option to improve Cloudflare’s impact popped up later (hat tip Xi Zhu), in that Cloudflare’s caching could be optimized. I didn’t explore this further.

Quick notes. Happy if anything here was of interest, stoked if someone can poke into my thinking 😬

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m an engineering lead, guerrilla philosopher, and indie publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you use every day (like Google) and companies you’ve never heard of, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and perspectives. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)