Should I use Cloudflare

Web Performance Discuss Test Results
1

My website is [url]https://www.garrisonrr.org/[/url] and I mainly only care about visitors to the site located in Maryland.

Now that I have excellent scores with the following, I am wondering if using Cloudflare would be a logical next step or just leave well enough alone.

[list]
[]Webpagetest scores are straight A’s except no CDN.
[]Pingdom is 100% and less than 1 second (in the ms) most of the time
[]Google page insights score is 97 desktop and 90 mobile.
[]GTMetrix score is 99 for page speed score and 95 for YSLOW
[/list]

I am on a Godaddy Level 1 shared account using wordpress and use SuperCache and Autoptimize for helping speed up the site.

Thanks you for any help. Webpagetest has been an excellent tool for helping me to get the great scores I have.

2

Do you have attack traffic you are trying to protect against? If not, your use case is pretty much the reason that CDN’s aren’t universally necessary. If the site is performing well for the region where people are visiting from then there isn’t necessarily a compelling reason to add the complexity of a CDN.

They can do a lot of other things as well but if you add one depends on if any of those matter for you:

  • Offload bandwidth
  • Reduce server load
  • Protect against attacks (DDOS, Bots, etc)
  • Serve evergreen content if the origin server goes down
  • Automate optimizations (like image compression)
  • Add HTTPS support (if the origin doesn’t already support it)
  • Add HTTP/2 support

With the additions also come another layer of complexity for something to go wrong. More logs and congigs to look through if visitors are having issues.

If you’re happy with how it is performing and you’re largely serving a local market I wouldn’t recommend changing things.

3

Thanks. I appreciate that feedback.

Server load and bandwidth are fairly low. I had a couple of spammers that got through some of the survey and quiz software last month, even with captcha, but that seems to be resolved now. The serve evergreen content would be nice, but I think my site has only been down about a total of 4 or 5 hours since the beginning of the year, and unlike some folks that do a lot of ecommerce, my site does very little. I think I have image sizes in great shape so no need for automating that. Finally, the website is already HTTPS.

Looks like you talked me out of it. :slight_smile: