Cloudflare and its free service to improve your website's availability

Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0

Since I started the blog, I’ve been transparent about its technical aspects, and in fact, you have the How it’s made¹ section fully updated.

This week I registered the domain with Cloudflare’s² free service to improve the website’s availability. Want to know what it entails, how I did it, and what changes I’ve observed? Keep reading.

Cloudflare is an American company that offers various internet services. Among them, two are free: the CDN³ and DDoS attack prevention⁴. A CDN is a content delivery network. Simply put, it’s several strategically geographically distributed servers that store your website, thus improving speed (when there’s an access, it’s directed to the nearest server) and availability (it’s less likely for the site to go offline if it’s replicated on several servers). A DDoS attack, also simplified, occurs when multiple devices (many) make multiple requests to a specific server or network, aiming to saturate it and make it unavailable.

Before activating the service, I’m going to perform some preliminary performance tests, to be able to check if it improves afterwards. It’s important to note that, depending on the network status and other factors, the tests can vary continuously, so they’ll only be an estimate.

I’ll perform the first test with Google’s PageSpeed Insights⁵ service. The result is a score of 88/100 in web performance on a computer and a score of 64/100 on a mobile. You can access the details of these analyses in the following links:

• PageSpeed analysis on a computer before activating Cloudflare
• PageSpeed analysis on a mobile before activating Cloudflare

I’ll perform the second test using the Pingdom Website Speed Test⁶ service, which allows us to calculate the blog’s loading time from different cities around the world. You have a summary of the results in the following table:

The average performance score in Pingdom is 86 and the average loading time is 1.66 seconds.

Next, I’ll perform the free procedure to activate Cloudflare services. Want to know how I did it step by step? Check the following link: Step-by-step activation of a domain in Cloudflare

Now we’ll perform the same previous analysis again, to know how the blog’s performance and loading speed have varied.

The result in PageSpeed is a score of 98/100 in web performance on a computer and a score of 87/100 on a mobile. You can access the details of these analyses in the following links:

• PageSpeed analysis on a computer after activating Cloudflare
• PageSpeed analysis on a mobile after activating Cloudflare

In the following table, you have the summary of the analyses performed in Pingdom:

The average performance score in Pingdom is 82.71 and the average loading time is 1.5 seconds.

We see that the PageSpeed scores have improved considerably, and that’s very positive for the blog, as it’s one of the factors to consider for positioning it in Google’s search engine. In Pingdom, although the average loading time is lower, it has caught my attention that now the loading time for cities in Europe and South America is slower than before activating the service. It’s unfortunate, since most of the visits come from these regions. But there’s an important detail. In Cloudflare, the following image appears:

The total loading time with Cloudflare is slower, however, partial content is displayed more quickly. Isn’t it the blank screen that frustrates us? Don’t we prefer to check earlier that the page is loading? What are the chances that someone will abandon a website they’re trying to visit once “something” has loaded?

We continue searching⁷.