I've been trying to increase page load speed on my blog for a couple of years now – and I've finally found a tool that helps me do it – Cloudflare. My blog page load speed has been fluctuating for a while, not helped by a host that throttled my site every time it got a little bit of extra traffic. I don't have a high-traffic blog, so I soon changed that host. I also experimented with better coded WordPress themes and caching plugins. All of them helped but none of them produced the rapid improvements I've seen with CloudFlare.
Boosting Page Load Speed with CloudFlare
CloudFlare is actually a security tool, aimed at protecting your site from online threats such as spammers, bots and exploit attackers. The page load speed boost is a welcome side effect, produced from the way CloudFlare works with your site. Here's how CloudFlare describes the service:
CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.
Getting Started with CloudFlare and Page Load Speed
Once I'd signed up for a free account with CloudFlare it took less than 5 minutes to get it working. I added my URL, watched the introductory video and waited for the site to detect my DNS info. (If it doesn't, you can fill it in manually.) I then got some new name servers from CloudFlare and logged into GoDaddy to enter those, then I was done with the initial step. As with most DNS changes, you have to wait for them to propagate, but you will know that everything's working well when you start to see your analytics dashboard. I also downloaded a WordPress plugin to ease the integration between my blog and the CloudFlare network.
Setting Up CloudFlare
When you've completed those initial steps, you can go into the settings panel and adjust what you want. I started with the default settings, but then used the guide on this forum to make some tweaks and help improve page load speed. The setting cover security, caching, minifying images, setting a challenge for bots, masking email addresses, keeping your site online and more. This last feature is one of my favorites. Because CloudFlare caches your site, and essentially works as a content delivery network (CDN), your site is always online, no matter what happens. If there's a temporary problem, then CloudFlare serves up the cached version of your pages, so site visitors see no difference.
CloudFlare in Action – How My Page Load Speed Improved
It took a couple of days for the stats to start rolling in for my blog, but when they did, I was happy with the site speed performance and improvements. The one page dashboard includes information on page views, hits and bandwidth. It shows how much faster your pages load with CloudFlare (this info takes a few more days to populate the dashboard). In my case, CloudFlare shaved nearly a minute off my average page load time and saved 1.8GB of bandwidth. I don't just have CloudFlare's word for that, either. I monitor my site with an external app and saw an improvement in page load speed in that report within two days of signing up with CloudFlare.
The main page also includes the top 5 search engines that have crawled your site, the number of pages crawled and the last crawl date and information about the top 5 outbound links that readers have clicked.
There's also a link to the threat control panel, where you can see what kind of threat has targeted your site, how serious it is on a scale of 1-100, which country the threat came from and what action CloudFlare took (which is to challenge it). You can block or trust the particular threat and also add your own IP or country rules to your block or trust list.
And there's a bonus: I have also seen a marked decline in the amount of spam I have to process on my blog, which also saves me time. So far (I've been using it for about 10 days), I'm sold on the idea of CloudFlare and I'm considering recommending it to one of my clients whose site attracts a lot of spam.
Add-Ons to CloudFlare
Another interesting feature of CloudFlare is that you can integrate it with a number of apps, though in some cases you will have to sign up separately for accounts with the app providers. These include VigLink, Clicky, Apture, Monitis, UserVoice, Pingdom, SnapEngage, ExceptionHub, Zoompf, StopTheHacker, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. I setup Google Analytics by pasting in my Analytics ID and left the rest alone. Every time I login there are a couple of new apps, so it's worth watching this page.
There are also Pro and Enterprise plans, but the basic features of the free plan will be enough for most bloggers. The main benefit of switching to one of the paid plans are real-time stats, resource analysis and optimization and some advanced security features.
CloudFlare: The Verdict
So, is CloudFlare right for everyone? If you already have a fast loading site, are using a CDN and are confident that your blog and web host are hacker proof, then you may not need it. For me, though, it's been great and I'm happy to be using CloudFlare for my writing blog. The page load speed increases alone are worth it, but the ability to block threats and the knowledge that my site will always be online are also priceless.
[box type=”important”]Here's a Trouble Shooting Guide from the CloudFlare blog to address some common problems.[/box]
Nice detailed review about CloudFlare. I’ve seen many bloggers who stopped using it because their readers had to complete that form as their IP was marked as SPAM. So, I would rather prefer to use Dropbox or Google Apps as a CDN rather than CloudFlare. What do you have to say on that ??
Good point, Mani. I’ll have to check with my readers. I haven’t had any complaints from the regulars, though.
Yeah, you are right Mani. This is the reason why I don’t want to install CloudFlare on my blog. When I visit some sites using CloudFlare, I always see their security pages and it requires me to fill in a captcha code to enter the site. It would be very annoying for almost all readers. The problem will only be solved when they add my IP range to the whitelist.
At CloudFlare, we let you pick whatever security level you want, from HIGH (in which case the challenge page/CAPTCHA are more likely to appear) down to ESSENTIALLY OFF (which will only block the worst of the worst, such as those launching DDoS attacks). If you’re more concerned with performance than security, just turn the security level down your visitors should never be bothered with the challenge.
Thanks for the review!
Matthew / @eastdakota
CEO @ CloudFlare
Thanks so much for your explanation. I thought this is a fixed feature of CloudFlare and if so, it would be very annoying. I would give it a try then.
I turned my security level to “off” and is okay now 🙂
Thank you for clearing that up Matthew. I was talking to my IT guy about possibly installing cloudflare last week to speed up the load time of our site and he mentioned concerns about the captcha from the research he did.
If we can lower the setting then cloudflare sounds like something I certainly want to look into. Is there a way to monitor how many times the captcha is being presented? Or do we just have to hope for user feedback to get a gauge? Thanks
Glad to hear you’ve had a positive experience. Now that I’m into my 3rd month of using it, I still love Cloudflare.
I used cloudflare few months back, I was satisfied with the increase in speed and performance, but the issue which I was facing is the disturbance in the no. of pageviews and unique visitors (in Google Analytics),
Are you facing the same issue ? Do let me know.
It’s hard to tell after such a short time, Rajan, but according to Google Analytics my page views and uniques seem to be up. I’ll have to monitor it and see.
Rajan,
If the plugin blocks a lot of bot or other traffic that could cause analytics to show fewer visitors. Have you compared before and after date periods to see which traffic dropped from where?
Well, I’d like to do it with a longer period, Gail, but a week to week comparison for my first week of using the service, suggests that bot traffic is down (and that a lot of my traffic comes from bots originating in the US, UK and Australia (which surprised me). None of my regular readers has complained about not being able to leave a comment. Interestingly, engagement with my content is up. I’ll recheck after a full month and see what I find.
Goes to show that not all hosts are paying for superbowl ads with unlimited resources.
Interesting…
Pingback: BizSugar.com
Im using CloudFlare on all my sites, makes a massive difference, especially as page spped now effects search engine rankings.
That was one of the reasons I wanted to try it, David. Now that there’s a Page Speed extension for Chrome, I’ll be able to get more reliable data soon.
I have heard about this tool before but I thought it’s purely for security purpose… never know about page load speed facility.
It seems that was a side effect of their primary intention, Sam, and it’s one I’ve been very happy with. The security tools are also welcome – and I like the fact that you can adjust them to the desired level.
I don’t think it approves speed, it just reduces the load on your servers from hackers and spammers.
I haven’t tried this service yet, I’d be too concerned of legit traffic being tagged as spam. I get a lot of readers from outside the US.
So do I, Jason, but I guess that’s what the whitelist is for. 🙂
Actually, we do improve speed in a number of ways, not just by keeping garbage traffic off your blog (although that does help).
We run our own global CDN with 12 data centers from Singapore to Frankfurt. Just like a CDN, we automatically cache your static resources closer to your visitors in these data centers. We’ve built these on extremely fast upstream connections and with ultra-modern hardware we specifically tuned to make static resources as fast as possible (e.g., we use only SSDs to make I/O amazingly fast). We also have performance options that go well beyond what any traditional CDN has ever offered. See, for example, this blog post on our innovative Rocket Loader which dramatically improves performance of blogs with a number of widgets or Javascript tags:
http://blog.cloudflare.com/56590463
And, as I said above, you can adjust your security level however you want. Two thirds of our users come from outside the U.S. and include sites ranging from the Ruling Party of Turkey to the Internal Revenue Service of Pakistan to the Government of Ghana.
Give us a try and definitely let us know if there are any ways we can be even better for bloggers!
Matthew / @eastdakota
CEO @ CloudFlare
I have been using CloudFlare for a while now, and primarily the reason was to increase my sites performance. The extra security is an added bonus 🙂 Did it help, oh Yes! I am really happy that I decided to use their services and now that they have added extra free apps, it makes it all better.
I have heard though that there are many concerns as far as analytics and SEO is concerned. SEO wise, I have not felt any difference, but stat wise yes. I am not so sure how accurate those figures are, specially with the integration of Google Analytics. Something I am still looking very closely. We’ll see.
Good to hear your experience with it, DiTesco. I’ll monitor stats in Analytics and Clicky and see if there’s any major change. So far, so good, though. 🙂
I started using as a free account in cloudflare and just upgrade myself to pro 2 days ago, and saw something that surprise me a few hours ago which lasted about 5 to 10 minutes, and that is my blog go into “500 Internal Server Error” and there is a line of word below that writes “cloudflare” I immediately contact them through email but had yet to get a respond, and though it said my load speed is 2 second, but when I check with Alexa it still said 5 second and which is slow and might be penalize by search engine.
The results for the last 2 days is poor especially traffic to my blog, it drops about 100 to 200 page views in my two days of testing as a pro account user, but since it’s a weekend, I will had to test it out in weekdays and see if the traffic is able to go up.
And secondly I was wondering why their upgrade button to pro account is not high-lighted on the main page, I feel fishy… and though I want to upgrade to pro account and I didn’t find the upgrade button, I send in an email and they told me they had help me to upgrade which means, they had the ability to move you to pro account without even confirming it with you… kinded fishy too…
Still I will test it out and see what’s the results, if it’s good then I will use , if it’s not… then I will had to find another company that does…
Thanks for sharing your experience, Wong Chendong. I’d be interested to hear how it turns out.
It’s a fantastic free service and now that I got it to work it definitely helps speeding up my site.
The installation was actually pretty straight-forward, but for some reason something went wrong with the www. prefix. It completely destroyed the site at first, but thanks to the fantastic Live Chat support of Hostgator, it was fixed in about 30 minutes.
Apparently I did something wrong by the way, so a typical installation should be pretty non-destructive 😀
I found it pretty easy, Sietse, and I was expecting problems (call me a pessimist). My fears were unfounded and installation was smooth.
What were your problems and how did Hostgator tell you to fix it?
I tried to install w3 cache yesterday and it made my header and footer disappear.
I’m hosted at hostgator as well.
This makes me a bit hesitant to install cloudflare. I don’t want any downtime.
I’m already relieved that my site was back to normal when I deleted w3 cache.
Thanks for making this article. I hoped to ask you if you have noticed improvement in search engine ranking from using Cloudflare?
Too soon to tell, Tikyd and since my site already has a page one ranking for its main keyword, I might not notice much difference anyway. I’ll monitor the secondary keywords and see what happens.
This is great. I’m going to try the service.
The other day Brian from Copyblogger was telling someone that he won’t tweet any more links from her site if she doesn’t upgrade her hosting.
Every time he links to her site it crashes.
That’s bad.
Cloudflare should stop something like that happening, Olivia, with its ‘always on’ feature.
I have very recently (just less than a week) started using Cloudflare and I love it. I actually did the change of DNS the wrong way and delayed the process by about 2 days (during which I had outages). But that was totally my mistake. When I figured out the right way to do it, it took about 2 minutes to change them and less than 24 hrs for the changes to take effect.
It is a great service 🙂
Jane.
Glad you like it too, Jane. Have you stayed with the default settings or have you made any changes?
These results are thoroughly interesting. Even though I run W3 Total Cache with a CDN through Amazon S3, I’m still convinced that I might want to try this on my site, especially if it’s offering free CDN-type capabilities.
Go for it, Dave! Come back and let us know how Cloudflare works for you.
Been using CloudFlare for a while now and the results seem pretty good.
Wow, this seems to be a great tool. And it seems changing the DNS is all you need to do. How do they cache your site? Do they cache all scripts as well?
Yes, there’s some script caching, which I think you can turn on and off as you wish. Cloudflare also has a development mode to allow you to turn off caching while making changes to the site.
This is the first time I have heard of CloudFlare. Your review was awesome, and since I have experienced problems with both speed and hackers, I decided to sign up 🙂
Thanks a lot.
Glad you found the review useful, Jens. I hope CloudFlare works as well for you as it has for me.
Pingback: wordpressjunkies.net
We used CloudFlare for a couple of months, but CloudFlare went down three or four times during that time, and left our site inaccessible. That may be because CloudFlare was experiencing growing pains, but it meant we experienced more downtime than we otherwise would have. It may improve page load speed and keep your site (partially) up if your server crashes, but you also have to content with CloudFlare’s own downtime.
That’s a good point, Sam. So far, I’ve not experienced this, and CloudFlare imply that with your content in multiple data centers, that’s unlikely. It’s something to watch out for.
Now that is very disappointing. Site downtime is not acceptable.
I have been using CloudFlare almost since their beginning. When they were “down”, they were down only for a few minutes and for a small fractions of users. Their was only one instance that they were down for longer than a few minutes, and that was from a massive DDoS attack directed at the DNS servers.
Overall, their service is really stable. It’s more than likely that the downtime you experienced was from your host. Again, if they were “down”, it would only be for a small fraction of users and for a few minutes.
Good to know you like the service too, Adam. 🙂
That’s a helpful tip Sharon!
I’m also on a constant quest to find tools and strategies which effectively and consistently speed up my blog. I’ll give the free version of Cloud Flare a go. Always a bonus to have extra spam protection too…
Did you install the Cloud Flare plugin they recommend as well?
A little further down the line I’ll probably shell out for a Cloud Server service such as vps.net which will make a serious improvement in site speed!
Many thanks for sharing this…
Yes, I installed the plugin, Jym. A cloud server would be the next logical move, I think.
Thanks for a great review – a service that cuts spam is great. Providing an increase in load speed as well definitely makes it worth checking out (which I’m doing right now)
Cheers
I’d be interested to hear if your experience with CloudFlare matches mine, Joe.
Awwww that’s nice 1. I vl surely try this, um gonna try it right now 😀 haPPY bLOggING 😀
Thanks for this very informative article. I’ve had some slow loading speeds and have just installed a caching plugin, which seems to make it better, but there’s still room for improvement, so I will give it a try.
Thanks very much! I had only heard of cloud flare as a security thing. I will install it tomorrow to see if it gives a speed boost.
I’ve found it good so far, Hanns and Paul, but I’ve temporarily turned off Cloudflare’s beta Rocket Loader feature as it seemed to be messing with my newsletter signup form and Facebook widget.
“I’ve found it good so far, Hanns and Paul, but I’ve temporarily turned off Cloudflare’s beta Rocket Loader feature as it seemed to be messing with my newsletter signup form and Facebook widget.”
Please be sure to report that bug here: https://www.cloudflare.com/wco-bug-report.html
How can you differentiate it to other WordPress plug in such as W3 Cache etc. What is better? I need an honest opinion 🙂
I don’t think my experience is typical, but I’ve had terrible problems with W3Cache and other similar plugins, so CloudFlare is a big improvement for me.
Hi,
What sort of problems did you have with the cache plugins??
Paul
Various broken pages and files; loss of images in my RSS feed and other similar problems, Paul. And my host throttling my site also caused other problems. CloudFlare seems to address both issues.
CloudFlare and these plugins are not comparable. They do two different things. One caches HTML and CloudFlare cache other static content.
A good review and a very different perspective of how I experienced CloudFlare, and which I wrote about here: http://www.husdal.com/2011/07/01/incapsula-versus-cloudflare/
CloudFlare is a great tool and it works for some, and maybe not so well for others. From the comments I gather that the opinions are quite mixed, and in my case, I found something better.
Thanks for the link to your review, Jan. It’s interesting to have the comparison between the two tools.
This sounds like a very good service, I am aware of it from some time but never had the chance to test it. The latest reviews that I read on the internet gives me the idea that this is a great service that worth used. I will start testing it myself this week.
Thanks for sharing the info with us.
Initially it looked like an affiliate review but by the end of post I could just say is Awesome switch to it right now
Nope, I’m not an affiliate, Amit, just a fan. 🙂
CloudFlare is indeed pretty awesome. Try checking our blog at CloudFlare for some helpful tips.
That is a good advantage… using cloud services is really a nice tool..
Security of a blog is a important issue for bloggers, need to check out the services of cloudflare.
The installation was actually pretty straight-forward, but for some reason something went wrong with the www. prefix.
Hi,
What happened with the www? Was it missing in your DNS settings & did you add it?
One thing that confuses people: We can’t proxy wildcard subdomains, which www would be part of, so you explicitly need to define these subdomains in your DNS settings.
The beauty of Cloudflare’s model is that they sit between you and the customer. It’s a very powerful position to be in. That means that Cloudflare can offer “bolt-on” application rentals for your website.
I’ve had some truely dreadful wordpress plugins over the years (not naming names) that love deep integration and heavy database usage to provide fairly mundane solutions. Then of course when the owner realises they’re mundane they remove them without deactivating them – hence they’re still ticking away in the background eating up resources without actually doing anything!
I was using Gtmatrix from past few months but seriously this tool has some genuine advantage over it, thanks for sharing this blog is really helping me out!
I never known about the Cloudflare before. I think this tool will help everyone who want his page blog loading faster. thanks for share about this..
I tried CF for a little while and it actually slowed my site down. Dramatically.
It is very unusual for us to slow a site down. What were you using to test? Did you send details to us so we could check it out?
I used cloudfare apparently. I was pretty much satisfied with the increasing speed viewed in my results. Ileane, I still have one question in mind – is it very secure for bloggers? I used it just for a reference purpose, hence I would like to know if it really is very effective.
I used cloudfare apparently. I was pretty much satisfied with the increasing speed viewed in my results.However, I still have one question in mind – is it very secure for bloggers? I used it just for a reference purpose, hence I would like to know if it really is very effective.
Pretty effective, I think, Mario. It does what it’s supposed to – cuts bad traffic and at the same time helps pages load faster by functioning as a CDN.
Hi Mario,
Yes, very secure. We add an additional security layer to your site & help stop known threats from even hitting you (more advanced features in Pro accounts, including a Web Application Firewall (WAF).
I use cloudflare for my runescape forum. Thanks for the post though, you have taught me some stuff I did not realize it had..
Is there anyhow i could do this on blogger blog?
Hi Derek,
Any site that has a custom domain (domain.com) and can change nameservers to point to us could use CloudFlare.
But there is a problem with cloudflare is that sometime cloudflare stops and our website gets stuck with the problem of Cloudflare 🙁
Is there any way to stop this problem means when cloudflare stops our hosting get the chance to work ?
Hi Raquel,
What do you mean by stops? You can always Pause CloudFlare in your settings if you’re seeing an issue.
Please tell me How to avoid CAPTCHA page.Whether we need to make security level low or OFF.please confirm I am waiting for your response.
After my experience with CloudFlare i recommend every blogger or site owner use this service. I recently received a warning from Google about my site’s page speed saying “Serve resources from a consistent URL
We have analyzed some of the pages on your sites that serve the most ads, and have detected Page Speed problems that create a highly negative user experience for some users. Frequently viewed pages on your sites are serving the same resource from multiple URLs, wasting client bandwidth and resources.”
So when I analyzed the warning above it was obvious page speed problem was the main issue, so I figured if I can improve my page speed then the problem will be solved. Then i implemented CloudFlare and since then i have experienced a faster page load speed, improved ranking and my visitors tend to spend more time on my blog now as my daily pageviews is a great indication to this.
Thanks Sharon! Now search engine also considers page load speed as one of the ranking factor so it’s important to make our blog faster. I would give a try cloudfire.
Nice post!
Awesome post thanks for sharing this great article do keep it up !