Cloudflare will help WordPress load much faster
If you have been in the world of web development for a while you will know that the speed of loading sites is fundamental to have a good position in Google, and to ensure good speed, a CDN can help a lot.
In this category, Cloudflare has a lot of prestige, which besides caching pages to speed up its load, has DDoS protection tools, among other things.
They have now partnered with WordPress to launch their new Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) service to accelerate the experience of a site for end users.
The new service costs 5 dollars per month for WordPress clients on the free Cloudflare plan. What it does is extend Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) beyond static content delivery to include slower dynamic recovery content.
A key metric used by Cloudflare is the time to the first byte (TTFB). If it is slow, it slows down each remaining step to use CDN, such as compressing images and caching static content. Cloudflare says tests of its new service show a 72% improvement in TTFB for WordPress sites, a 13% improvement in the speed index and a 23% improvement in First Contentful Paint (speed at which users perceive a page to load).
Speed improvements are achieved by caching both static and dynamic content and delivering all content on a website from the Cloudflare CDN. Static content includes images and HTML files, while dynamic content changes depending on factors such as the time a user visits, their location or the device used.
To use it you must:
- Install the Cloudflare WordPress plugin on our WordPress website or update it to the latest version (3.8.2 or higher).
- Authenticate the plugin to communicate with Cloudflare.
- From the Home screen of the Cloudflare section, within WordPress, activate Automatic Platform Optimization.
You can read more about the service on the company’s blog, where they indicate that we will soon have option for more platforms, not just WordPress.
