Late 2020, Cloudflare launched their “Automatic Platform Optimization” service for WordPress.
It’s designed to serve WordPress sites from their edge network, in order to load pages quicker for users.
Given that it’s an additional $5 per month, it’s natural to ask whether or not the speed increase is “worth it”.
Before we look at that, let’s first note a few things:
- This is designed for sites that get a lot of traffic. If you don’t have a popular site, it probably won’t be worth the outlay, because caches will expire too quickly to be worth it.
- If you have a popular site, but it’s all coming from one geographical location, priority #1 would be to make sure you have a fast server located close to that location.
Test Results before Automatic Platform Optimization
Here are the timings report on GTMetrix before I setup Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization.
After running a few tests, it averaged out around 3 seconds to fully loaded.
Test Results After APO
After testing it a few times with APO enabled, it seemed the load time was brought down by 1 full second (33% less).
Final Thoughts
For a website that’s getting a lot of traffic, this is a significant improvement for a small bit of work and $5 per month.
Given that there’s no long commitment required, you could try it on your site, run GTmetrix to compare results, and then only keep it if you see a significant improvement.
Make sure to focus your tests on geographical regions your site gets traffic from, as the performance increases are unlikely to be equal in every location.
Hope that helps! Leave me any questions in the comments.
Leave a Reply