I am really impressed with Cloudflare as a CDN to improve page speed for your website.
I hadn’t before deployed any CDN on any of my portfolio of websites and for a good while I was stubborn thinking I’d be fine without a CDN — even though I knew of the benefits.
The results are rather compelling. I’d been wanting to improve my websites page speed score for a good while now and I’d tried multiple things to try and improve my page speed scores, notably First Contentful Paint and First Meaningful Paint.
You can see with Cloudflare, I’ve been able to have my energy switching website loading in 1.2 seconds (FCP) versus 2.2 seconds (FCP) before and overall have seen a 46% improvement in page speed:
The Page Speed Insights score has already improved massively from a score of c. 22 out of 100 to 66 out of 100:
A huge improvement. I’d also made some changes to reduce the number of images and I’m now using CSS for the background image in the header.
I’d also deployed Cloudflare on this website too and I’ve seen smaller improvement here of about 10%:
This site’s page speed score has also increased from 30 to 57 out of 100, so I’ve seen some good gains here too:
The conclusion: deploy Cloudflare or some sort of CDN as this’ll help improve the speed of your site and deliver your content faster to your users.
I’d enabled all these features in Cloudflare:
- WebP – Improve image load time by optimizing images hosted on your domain. Optionally, the WebP image codec can be used with supported clients for additional performance benefits.
- Auto Minify – Reduce the file size of source code on your website.
- Brotli – Speed up page load times for your visitor’s HTTPS traffic by applying Brotli compression.
- Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress – Improve the performance of your WordPress site. Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress serves your WordPress site from Cloudflare’s edge network and caches third party fonts. Get the benefits of a static site without any changes to how you manage your site. This results in consistent, fast TTFB and content loading faster.
- Enhanced HTTP/2 Prioritization – Optimizes the order of resource delivery, independent of the browser. Greatest improvements will be experienced by visitors using Safari and Edge browsers.
- TCP Turbo (PRO feature) – Reduce latency and throughput with custom-tuned TCP optimizations. Enabled automatically for Pro, Business, and Enterprise customers.
- Mirage (beta) – Improve load time for pages that include images on mobile devices with slow network connections.
- Rocket Loader™ – Improve the paint time for pages which include JavaScript.
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