Cloudflare lately has been garnering interest and strategic WordPress alliances not just with its CDN_Content Delivery Network but also Domain Management, Security Services and Performance Optimization. For example, Elementor Pro Cloud new offering CloudFlare as part of the overall bundle. More recently Cloudflare acquired Area 1 to bolster its Secure Email services.
But the crux of Cloudflare services lies in CDN and various performance optimizations. Cloudflare serves a broad range of Web development tools but has emphasized its WordPress performance services. And for this reason some recent testing which showed anomalous WordPress website slowdowns when converted to Cloudflare caught our attention.
Cloudflare Website Slowdown
Note that so far it is only one website but all the posts and pages on that Cloudflare powered DesignPics.fun WordPress website have seen 30% or more increases in response time plus minor upticks in page size and requests. Here are the before and after page results using GTMetrix measurement.
Posting Page Before & After SpeedResults
Note the original webserver delivers 0.713 second LCP and perfect Web Vitals scores.
But the Cloudflare hosted server does not d0 quite as well:
The Web core Vitals for the Cloudflare are good except for the LCP score which is 40% slower. We see the same situation with full response time on the Postings page.
The response time is even better before using Cloudflare while the datasize and requests are nearly the same.
Consider the same before and after speed results for the TPrees post page:
The before Table Press post runs blazing fast at 0.459 seconds
But the Cloudflare results for Table Press posting speed are disappointing:
Again, the Table Press Post runs slower, about 77%.
The anomaly, is why just changing the nameserver has such a large effect on response time with only minor increases in data size and requests. So later in the Spring there may be another moving website which will transfer from a standard hosting service to Cloudflare – and so the speed tests will be done again to see if there is a trend here.