Notes on Hooking Up a Website With Cloudflare
Published on Sep 3, 2024, filed under development (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)
As mentioned in my last episode of âWebsite Optimization Measures,â 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 Cloudflareâs 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 Cloudflareâs free-plan support is swearword. Itâs non-existent. (I have a post come up that describes how this support philosophy can really f you up. âYou,â 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 wasnât obvious (to me), but sure, these are to be set on Cloudflareâs end. (CNAME entries must not be proxied.)
Results were odd (and itâs 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 havenât taken the time to go through and understand the mixed results for that one domain, Iâve 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 Cloudflareâs impact popped up later (hat tip Xi Zhu), in that Cloudflareâs caching could be optimized. I didnât explore this further.
Quick notes. Happy if anything here was of interest, stoked if someone can poke into my thinking đŹ