Cloudflare Optimization for WordPress (FREE Method)
Tutorial Hosting
Hey how’s it going alex here from ideaspot in today’s wordpress tutorial i’m going to show you how to use cloudflare optimization to get a very dramatic improvement in your load times so in this example we were able to take a site from a 3.1 second
Load time to a 0.8 second load time in dallas a 1.5 second low time in london and a 1.4 second load time in hong kong so all around the world loading quite quickly now this is not using any kind of special hosting this was the cheapest hosting i could find
Just to demonstrate that this can probably work for a lot of even very cheap web hosts now for this tutorial i was just testing with a standard cadence starter template and i’m just using a free cloudflare plan if you haven’t got your website running through cloudflare already check out my previous
Tutorial i’ll put the link in the description where you can set up your free cloudflare account that’s very easy okay now the plugin that makes this all possible is called wp cloudflare super page cache now you can get this through your plugins add new and search for cloudflare this
Should pop up right after the official plugin here now this will give you the result for free this will cost five dollars a month for wordpress optimization so before you go with the official version it’s worth trying this one out because you might get the same result for free which i was
Able to do so go ahead install and activate that one now if you are interested in the official version cloudflare actually announced on their blog automatic wordpress optimization this came out just a few days ago so this is pretty cool but it does cost five dollars a month for people on the
Free plan if you are on a paid plan already you’ll get this included in your plan but for the rest of us using the free plan you can actually try out this plugin that i just mentioned the wp cloudflare super cache plugin so here we
Are we’re going to set this one up so first step to doing this is to log into your cloudflare account once you’re logged into your account go to your site now if you haven’t got your site on cloudflare check out my previous tutorial like i mentioned before i’ll put that link in
The description i’ll show you how to get your site onto cloudflare for free so go ahead and click on your site and we just need to go down to api get your api token and here is the api token tab we click that one and we want the global api key we want
To view that one all you have to do here is put in your password and go through the google recapture and your key will be displayed just copy that key out go back to our setup and then we’re just going to paste our key in here
And then pop in our email that we use for our cloudflare account and then we just have to update the settings and now it’s going to say select the domain so we scroll down and our site should pop up there we just go ahead and click update again
And now we can enable page caching so with any luck it will say page cache enabled successfully we click ok and from here we can actually test our cache and it will say the page cache is working properly and all we have to do here is we can
Actually go to advanced and we can actually preload the cloudflare cache across the whole cloudflare network so go ahead and click preload there under advanced and that is pretty much all there is to it and then over in gta metrics i’m going to go ahead and run a retest and just
Check that this is all working properly so adding job to the queue this should end up testing in a second and we should get a report out of this in just a minute there we go a little bit quicker this time so yeah pretty cool result
Now to double check this is all working properly you can actually load up a incognito window here pop the site in and what you want to do is actually look at the headers to make sure it’s caching properly so go to network and we want to reload this page here and
If we scroll up we can see the top one is ideaspot.space we can see the headers in google chrome so if you are working properly it will say cf cache status is hit so that means the cloudflare is caching this page and down the bottom we’ve got uh super cache is caching
So that looks all good and you also want to do the same thing on your admin panel go ahead and inspect and you want to go to network here go ahead and control reload we are looking at our top item here so that is this one and
In this case the admin panel should not be caching so we want that to say bypass and if we scroll down we can see wp super cache is listed as no cache no cache must revalidate so that is an important thing to know you should never be caching
Your admin panel when you’re logged in so definitely perform those couple tests just to make sure everything is working properly the other thing worth mentioning is under settings and wp cloudflare super cache under the faq because there are a few third-party integrations you need to be
Aware of so this is if you are integrating with things like rocket or lightspeed cache plugins they can conflict basically just go in here and follow the directions it basically means turn off the page caching on these plugins so it doesn’t interfere with your cloudflare page caching
I wasn’t actually even using any page caching’s plugin to do this so i still got a really good result even without additional page caching all i was using was the cloudflare super page cache to do this and the other thing worth mentioning is this is not a cure all for having slow
Hosting this doesn’t work on every single type of website it’s only going to be effective on pages that can be effectively displayed statically so front pages home pages blog pages those kind of pages will work really well it’s even fairly effective on woocommerce shop and product pages too
For the most part but if it is worth looking under a third party here woocommerce it won’t work on the cart checkout and the checkout pay page these obviously need to be unique for every single user so it’s not going to cache those that’s not going to work
And i would argue that the cart and checkout are the most important pages of a woocommerce site so if you’re running woocommerce definitely spend some money and get decent web hosting you can’t work around using cheap web hosting if you’re trying to do ecommerce now you can still use this plugin with
Woocommerce it just means that these pages aren’t going to be loaded through the cache they’re going to be loaded from your server so however fast or slow your server is is however fast or slow those few pages are going to load so that’s why it’s important to have good
Powerful web hosting for woocommerce now you can get pretty powerful hosting for cheap anyway i showed you how to set up a vulture high frequency vps for just i think it was six dollars a month in my previous tutorial i’ll link to that in the description too
If you want to run a fast woocommerce site that’s probably what i’d do if i was on a tight budget and there are probably other examples that aren’t going to work really well with this kind of cloudflare edge caching such as forums online courses where people need
To be filling in assignments and quizzes they need lots of dynamic content from your server so you need a powerful server in those cases but for your more basic websites and blogs and portfolio type things this is going to be pretty awesome i definitely recommend checking this out
And seeing if it works for you here’s another test i performed on the site after installing this plugin so you can see across the world the time to first byte is really quite low we’re averaging around 30 milliseconds before installing it we’re up around 800 or 900 milliseconds in most countries
The server is actually located in singapore so the singapore result was still pretty decent 148 milliseconds but by preloading the pages onto cloudflare’s content delivery network you’re able to cut that down so that is where most of our performance improvements are coming from all right that wraps it up so hopefully
That’s been useful give me a thumbs up if it’s been helpful for your website like i said if you’re running a simple website this can really give you a great performance upgrade now if you don’t have cloudflare up already i’ll pop that video right there so you can set up your free
Cloudflare account that’s quite easy too but thanks for watching i’ll see you next time
Learn how to optimize your WordPress loading speed with a free Cloudflare account. This leverages edge caching of your pages across the Cloudflare CDN. This has the big advantage of making your pages faster all over the world – not just for visitors near your server location. If you haven't set up a free Cloudflare account for your website yet, here are the instructions to do so: ➡️ https://youtu.be/_gxkk9uQxrM You can get this officially through Cloudflare's Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) service, which is included in paid plans but costs $5 per month per website with a free plan. https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatic-platform-optimizations-starting-with-wordpress/ However, it's worth trying the method we use in this video first, as in most cases you'll probably get the same result for free receive . As I mentioned in the video, some pages still need to be dynamically generated for each visitor – e.g. B. the WooCommerce shopping cart and checkout pages. If you want these to be as fast as possible, I would recommend setting up a Vultr high frequency server in my tutorial here: ➡️ https://youtu.be/7vUl16bdW8Q Or if you are a beginner you can easily get one Get Cloudways' Vultr managed high frequency server already set up for you here: ➡️ https://ideaspot.com.au/Cloudways (Free Trial) If you are interested in the cheap hosting I used in this tutorial, I have a discount recommendation here: ➡️ https://ideaspot.com.au/hostinger and use the voucher code ➡️ IDEASPOT for a nice discount. 0:00 Introduction to Cloudflare Optimization 0:56 WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache 1:24 Cloudflare Automatic Platform Optimization 1:50 WP Cloudflare Super Page Cache Settings 2:06 Get Cloudflare API Key 2:47 Enable Page Caching 3 :16 GTmetrix performance testing 4 :52 Integration with other performance plugins 7:13 TTFB performance improvements 7:44 Tutorial link to free Cloudflare account setup —————– ———– ———————— At IdeaSpot we support the free and open exchange of knowledge and information. Please support us by using the description links included here. In addition to the great discounts you can get through these links, they also help us grow by giving us a small commission for the referral. Thank you for supporting IdeaSpot so we can continue to bring you free content every week!
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