This morning I got an email saying “Your Website Just Got Faster”. That’s the kind of email I love to get. I had been using Cloudflare for a while for it’s added security and speed. Since site speed helps your SEO, I was extra happy to get this news.
I have a free account, so it didn’t cost me anything but the time to set it up. The email said I didn’t have to do anything as long as SPDY was already set up. It was already set up on my account, so I decided to see if HTTP/2 was really making a difference. When I checked my site, it did “seem” to be faster, but I always want concrete evidence.
I had set up Cloudflare on one of my client sites a while ago and had been working with her on site speed, so I happened to have her Google PageSpeed Insight numbers handy. Before the change, she had a mobile/desktop score of 45/68. After this change, she was rocking a 62/73. Note- these numbers change slightly every time you test, so test multiple times.
The point is, this is a (fairly) easy free way to speed up your site. So why wouldn’t you do it? You are going to have to get involved with setting some nameservers, so if you don’t feel comfortable with that, you might want to pay someone to do it for you. And remember, Cloudflare uses caching, so if you make changes to your site, they may not show up right away unless you clear the Cloudflare cache, which can be kinda a pain, so I would set it on development mode if you are making lots of changes.
Do you use Cloudflare or another CDN? If so, I’d love to hear your experience.
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