CloudFlare performance results - not worthwhile?
I would like to ask support and fellow clients about their experience implementing CloudFlare on their websites in terms of speed increase (or lack thereof).
I'm asking because I recently setup CloudFlare, and have been testing it, and see only an extremely minor difference. Note that beforehand I already had caching set up (Wordpress site using the WordFence's Falcon Engine).
Does anyone have any actual data of before/after that they've compared? In my specific case, here are examples of before and after:
Google PageInsights: Before 88, after 89/100 on desktop, and 73 vs 74 on mobile
Pingdom: Before 74/100 with a 448ms page load time, versus afterwards 76/100 with 425 ms page load time
GTMetrix: Before 92% Page Speed Grade, and 82% YSlow Grade, versus afterwards 96% Page Speed and 92% YSlow Grade.
So there is a difference, but it is miniscule. I'm wondering whether if because of InMotion's Max Speed Zones and SSD harddrives, shared hosting at InMotion doesn't really "need" a CDN like CloudFlare (at least on lower bandwidth sites without a ton of images)?
I do have experience using CloudFlare on a site with another hosting company, and the difference was tremendous (going from 2s load times to 0.8s), but that hosting company has an inferior hardware configuration compared to InMotion.
I'm very much considering to disable CloudFlare altogether given almost no performance improvement, but I would very much appreciate to hear from the community and support on their experiences!
I'm asking because I recently setup CloudFlare, and have been testing it, and see only an extremely minor difference. Note that beforehand I already had caching set up (Wordpress site using the WordFence's Falcon Engine).
Does anyone have any actual data of before/after that they've compared? In my specific case, here are examples of before and after:
Google PageInsights: Before 88, after 89/100 on desktop, and 73 vs 74 on mobile
Pingdom: Before 74/100 with a 448ms page load time, versus afterwards 76/100 with 425 ms page load time
GTMetrix: Before 92% Page Speed Grade, and 82% YSlow Grade, versus afterwards 96% Page Speed and 92% YSlow Grade.
So there is a difference, but it is miniscule. I'm wondering whether if because of InMotion's Max Speed Zones and SSD harddrives, shared hosting at InMotion doesn't really "need" a CDN like CloudFlare (at least on lower bandwidth sites without a ton of images)?
I do have experience using CloudFlare on a site with another hosting company, and the difference was tremendous (going from 2s load times to 0.8s), but that hosting company has an inferior hardware configuration compared to InMotion.
I'm very much considering to disable CloudFlare altogether given almost no performance improvement, but I would very much appreciate to hear from the community and support on their experiences!
Thank you for your question about the benefit of using Cloudflare. We appreciate the thoughtful information you included.
While some sites may see a speed increase, the only real benefit for a smaller site would be their DDOS protection.
Also, if your audience is geographically spread out, it can help people who are located far from InMotion Hosting's servers. For example, someone in India may get faster results to your page if cloudflare has a server located near them.
If you have any further questions, feel free to post them below.
Thank you,
John-Paul