CloudFlare and WP Super Cache CDN Settings?

CloudFlare isn’t a CDN in the traditional sense. Visitors will go to CloudFlare servers for the pages of your site rather than hitting your server. It acts like a proxy server for regular HTML pages, and does a good job of it!

I tried speedymirror.com, they offer a free trial of 50GB of bandwidth.

I’m very late to respond… my apologies.

CloudFlare isn’t a traditional CDN, but you’ll get the benefits of serving your static files (images, JS, CSS) from our global network (12 network nodes now, with 2 more coming shortly).

What’s confusing is that it’s so simple — just point your domain at CloudFlare, manage your authoritative DNS at CloudFlare (global Anycast network), and you automatically gain the benefits of our CDN.

Should work smoothly with WP Super Cache, with or without a separate/additional CDN.

John Roberts
CloudFlare

I have the new quick cache plugin installed which is similar to wp super cache and I also have cloudflare set up. For some reason my site seems to load slow unless I switch to developer mode in cloudflare. Would this mean that I need to get rid of CloudFlare or does anyone know of an easier fix?

Also when I view source it only shows that the QuickCache plugin is active when i’m in development mode. Does development mode completely deavtivate CloudFlare because if so I think I get much better performance just relying on QuickCache. My site is https://www.maxhouseplans.com

Thanks,

Max

@hfulbri1 – I don’t know that plugin, but I’ll do my best to answer your questions.

CloudFlare wouldn’t have any effect on whether the plugin is on or off. However, if you have Auto Minify (HTML) turned on in CloudFlare, then comments are stripped from the HTML and you would not see the “View Source” stats that Quick Cache puts there. Try turning off Auto Minify (HTML) if you have it turned on.

Here’s the answer about CloudFlare’s Development Mode (https://www.cloudflare.com/wiki/Development_Mode).

Your site loads quickly for me on CloudFlare. Were you signed in to WordPress when visiting your site? Your caching plugin treats signed in visitors differently, per the documentation.

Note: in the future, I’d suggest starting a new thread since your questions aren’t about WP Super Cache.

John

I just started using Cloudflare. I’m also using WP Supercache. My site is small, and I think the code is simple. I always resize my images in an editor before uploading them to my site. As far as I can tell, I’m doing everything right, yet I STILL score a measly 67/100 on the Google Page Speed test.

My score is lower than any other URL I plug into the speed test page. Anyone know what gives?

Here’s the site.

Adam, I don’t know what platform you are on, or what editor you are using to optimize your images, but I just ran the Page Speed Firefox plug-in on my end on your home page, and I got a Page Speed of 69.

If you look at the results page that Page Speed creates, you will see that it is telling you to do a number of things in order to improve your page.

For example, contrary to what you may think, your images are not optimized. I just used Page Speed to optimize a whole bunch of them, and on some of them, as much as 50% was saved.

Page Speed is also telling you that you need to use sprite sheets if you are using a lot of small images on your site. In my case, when I followed this one suggestion alone, and begin using sprite sheets for all of my small images, my page speed shot up 10-12 points just like that.

For example, even though my home page at https://www.endtimeprophecy.net is super loaded with graphics and such, it still scores 87 points. My blog at https://www.endtimeprophecy.net/Blog/ is slower, but still gets 78 points.

Page Speed is also saying that since your Thesis 18 theme CSS is so small, it is better to make it inline, as that will help to speed up things.

The same goes for an external javascript that you use called “adddomloadevent.js”. The content of the script is so small, that Page Speed recommends making it inline as well.

There are other things, but those are some of the main things that Page Speed is telling you to do.

You really need to pay attention to Page Speed’s recommendations. They do help to speed up your page load time, and Google does look at that.

BTW, I have those optimized images in a zipped archive if there is some way that I can get them to you. I optimized them through Page Speed itself using the “Save As” option, and then optimized again using another program.

Wow, very helpful – thanks! Feel free to email the images to me at adam [at] adamgreenmedia.com

I must admit that I thought optimizing images was just a matter of putting them in an editor (in my case, GIMP) and scaling them to the appropriate size – in other words, an actual 300 x 300 image instead of a huge image resized to 300 x 300 with html.

Any suggestions about optimizing images going forward?

Also, I don’t know how to make a sprite sheet. I’ve seen examples, so I know what they are. I just don’t know how to go about making one. For that matter, I don’t know what making my CSS or .js file inline actually means. I’m somewhat technically proficient, though. If it’s not hard to do, I’m pretty sure I could take care of it. Any recommended tutorials I should take a look at?

Thanks again for the help.

For optimizing images you could try smushit.com (there’s a WordPress plugin for that, too).

CloudFlare has a lot of features like minifying HTML, CSS, and JS that you can turn on in “Cloudflare Settings” section for your website. Although, since it’s all done on-the-fly, I’m not sure if the added processing time is worth the slightly reduced file size and the resulting faster transfer.

@chadrew – the added processing time you worry about is nearly non-existent. Truly. Test for yourself with CloudFlare Settings.

My blogs are hosted on StableHost and I have enabled CloudFlare which is inbuilt into my webhost cpanel. ( https://www.architecture-student.com and https://www.civilprojectsonline.com )

I have also enabled WP Super Cache plugin PHP mode.

My blogs keep hitting CPU limit everyday. And there is downtime.

My question is, do I need WP Super Cache plugin when I have CloudFlare enabled? Both of them seem to be doing the same stuff… Are these two services messing up with my CPU time by essentially doing the same things twice, and in effect degrading my load times?

Any advice is appreciated…

Cheers!

I don’t know that host but perhaps your hosting is simply too little for the type of site you have. If you have any plugins that do expensive SQL queries then that may cause the problem. The cached content has to be generated at least once..

I have been using cloudflare as well.. I’m about to quit since I had an issue with my site the other day. Cloudflare assumed that my PC had a virus on my laptop and when I visited my home page, I was greeted with a captcha box along with ads for hostgator and storm vps or something.

WP Supercache won’t hurt anything with CloudFlare running. They actually say to use your existing cache system, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Ect..

I get the best results using WP Super Cache, WPSCMin (Minify), DB Reloaded Fix (Cache DB Queries) and xcache plugin. On a shared host like bluehost or hostgator, you should be able to run all those plugins except the xcache plugin unless your host actually has xcache installed.

You can search the plugin section for the listed plugins. But here is the site links if u want to read the details.

WPSCMin; https://lyncd.com/wpscmin/
XC Plugin https://neosmart.net/WP/XCache/ (From 2007 but works fine)

We encourage using CloudFlare alongside WP Super Cache and other techniques for improving performance. One thing to avoid, however, is doing minification in multiple places. CloudFlare offers this service, broken down by CSS, JS, and HTML. Some plugins do the same. Test for yourself, but pick one method for minification.

@cbunting99 — you should add your IP to the Trust List for your site. Curious if the IP address you were on at the time was your home or office or a public network. Any advertisements on the challenge page are targeted to anti-virus services, as that is one of the most common causes of an IP address having a compromised reputation. Also, the score is dynamic, so every successful visit through the captcha trains the system that the address is improving.

John

Thank you @donncha
I am afraid to jump to VPS. I am not a programmer. So, I am stuck with shared hosting. I might jump to HostGator. It has good reviews. But I don’t know if it would be able to support my blogs.

Thank you @cbunting99 for the advice.
After reading your post, I have installed DB Reloaded Fix and replaced WP Super Cache with Hyper Cache Extended which I have heard is faster. Also, there is some plugin “Use Google Libraries” which supposedly decreases load on servers by borrowing shared libraries from Google CDN.

I cannot use Minify because I am afraid it would mess up my Google Adsense code.

Also, in cloudflare, set security to “Essentially Off” so that it does not turn back my visitors.

@john,
Thanks for the advice…

I have wp-supercache and cloudflare. I’m facing strange behaviors and I guess it’s a conflict between them.
When I edit a post and hit update I recieve this error:
Operation timed out with 0 out of -1 bytes received

The post will updates but this error is annoying and other authors are not aware about this bug.