Introduction
CloudFlare is a content delivery network that protects your site against DDOS attacks.CloudFlare offers some configurable options to improve your website performance.
This how-to article will show you how to configure CloudFlare website performance settings.
Prerequisite;
- Active website
- CloudFlare account
How to Configure CloudFlare Website Performance Settings
Getting started
Activate your CloudFlare account and add your domain. Log in to your account and select your domain. You should see something that looks like the below;
Click on Speed to set performance settings. Nine options are available for configuration;
- Speed
- Polish
- Railgun
- Enable accelerated mobile links
- Brotli
- Mirage
- Rocket Loader
- Mobile redirect
- Prefetching URLs From HTTP Headers
Let’s go through the above options to see what they do for our site.
Speed
Under minify, make sure you enable Javascript, CSS, HTML. This setting speeds up your site by removing the white spaces and comments in your code while maintaining your code’s functionality.
Polish
This setting optimises images hosted on your domain. It reduces information such as date and time from your images, therefore, making them load faster. It has 4 settings;
- Off – polish is disabled
- Lossless- reduces the size of images without reducing the visual quality.
- Lossy – visual quality may be impacted.
- Serve WebP images – when a client requests an image and his browser supports WebP image codec, CloudFlare serves
However, you have to have a pro plan to use this setting.
Railgun
This option allows your dynamic content to be delivered faster by compressing dynamic content while comparing page versions. It also requires you to have a business plan.
Enable Accelerated Mobile Links
This option makes your sites load at least three times faster than usual. This is by using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology. AMP uses a strict kind of HTML and little JavaScript to make sure your browser can load web pages quickly.
You have to enable them and select your Subdomains.
Brotli
This setting compresses data, reduces bandwidth consumption and thus helps your content load faster. As compared to gzip, it performs better by 20% when it comes to compressing HTML, CSS and Javascript.
Mirage
This setting is based on the network connection and device type. Your content can be displayed even to users who have a slow network connection. Devices with small screens and slow connections receive smaller and lower resolution images. By streamlining all requests into one, it reduces image loading. You need one of the paid plans to use it.
Rocket Loader
This option improves your speed by loading your javascript including third-party scripts synchronously so that your content is shown in full.
Mobile Redirect
This setting allows your users who are using mobile devices to be redirected to a mobile-optimized site. You simply have to select a subdomain, and you are ready to go.
Prefetching URLs from HTTP Headers
This feature allows CloudFlare to prefetch files listed in the manifest files so that when users request something, it is ready. You must have an enterprise plan to use this setting.
Conclusion
We have seen all the options CloudFlare offers to speed up our site. The only features you can use for the free plan is the Auto Minify, Accelerated Mobile Links, Brotli, Rocket loader and Mobile Redirect.
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