Cloudflare WordPress APO and Pro

bikegremlin

My cycling website's hosting server is located in the US right now.
Most of the visitors come from the US, followed by UK and Canada.
But, a large number is also from Australia and the Philipines.

Based on my previous testing, hosting server location doesn't impact page-load speed by a lot.

However, while that holds true for most locations, Australia and southeastern Asia seem to be sort of cut-off. With notcieably longer, slower, average page-load times.

That, in addition to just stupid curiosity, was a reason for giving Cloudflare APO a try.
Unlike the free plan, APO allows Cloudflare to work as a real, proper CDN.
Taking care of cache invalidation, and caching even the dynamic WordPress WooCommerce pages, without any hiccups (mixing cart contents for different users etc.).
That works a lot more trouble-free compared to LiteSpeed.

I also gave Cloudflare Pro a try.
Some extra performance and security options.

This is my article, with step-by-step installation and configuration instructions, test results and comparison with LiteSpeed:
Cloudflare WordPress APO + Pro review

TL/DR - LiteSpeed Enterprise you get for free (included in the hosting price) with a decent shared/reseller hosting provider gets you 90% of the performance gains, so CF APO & Pro are nothing to write home about. But for websites making income, I think they can be a good choice.

I'd like to thank @Ympker for taking the time and helping out with the "visitor subjective feel" testing. Much appreciated.

Ympker

I meant to click on "Maybe for some use-cases". It's already too hot today lol. Anyway, I never felt the urge to use Cloudflare for my own sites, or my client sites. My website is catering to german clients and about 99% of people visiting it are from here, so I wouldn't profit much from a CDN since my website is hosted at Hetzner Germany (MyW) anyway. My clients are also mostly from Germany and their website visitors are usually also from Germany. I put them on Ionos Germany and everything works just fine. The few international clients I have usually have their site hosted on a server in their country but their visitors would also just be "locals" or people from the same country.

Tl;dr: didn't need CF (free/paid) so far, but it can probably help in some use cases (gameservers, internationally facing websites/projects, ddos protection...).

bikegremlin

@Ympker said:
I meant to click on "Maybe for some use-cases". It's already too hot today lol. Anyway, I never felt the urge to use Cloudflare for my own sites, or my client sites. My website is catering to german clients and about 99% of people visiting it are from here, so I wouldn't profit much from a CDN since my website is hosted at Hetzner Germany (MyW) anyway. My clients are also mostly from Germany and their website visitors are usually also from Germany. I put them on Ionos Germany and everything works just fine. The few international clients I have usually have their site hosted on a server in their country but their visitors would also just be "locals" or people from the same country.

Tl;dr: didn't need CF (free/paid) so far, but it can probably help in some use cases (gameservers, internationally facing websites/projects, ddos protection...).

You'd see even a bit slower load times on average, for most use cases.

I like CF for the ease of DNS change replication, extra security layer, and averaging page-load times across the globe (a bit slower for those near the server, a lot faster for those far away).

havoc

For me the headache is that it is 5 bucks per site. Doesn't matter if it is a reasonable size, but for multiple smaller sites that adds up

bikegremlin

@havoc said:
For me the headache is that it is 5 bucks per site. Doesn't matter if it is a reasonable size, but for multiple smaller sites that adds up

Yup - it adds up pretty quickly.
Though, technically, it's per a domain.
I tested with 6 live and a few test-sites, all with just one subscription (subdomains).

But I don't think it makes sense if a website (at least one on the domain) isn't making money to cover the cost.