What you should (and shouldn’t) enable in Cloudflare for web performance
Cloudflare is a web-performance-and-security-as-a-service company.
To configure your web app to run faster, you need to:
- sign up for Cloudflare
- connect it to your site (by moving DNS records and setting up proxying)
- enable a few toggles in the settings.
The configuration panel has a lot of tabs. You’ll need these:
Let’s go over settings you should (and shouldn’t) enable in Cloudflare.
Speed tab
✔ Polish
Enable this to automatically optimize images. The “Serve WebP images” option is the best in most cases. This requires a Pro account, but it’s not very expensive ($20/month).
✔ Brotli
Enable this to make text content you serve (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) smaller in size.
❓ Mirage
Try enabling this to make images load faster on mobiles or slower networks. This might cause rare issues if your app has e.g. image carousels or photo viewers – so if you have problems later, disable this.
❌ Auto Minify
If you’re developing a web app with a modern frontend, it’s extremely likely that it’s already minified – so you won’t need this option.
Caching tab
✔ Caching level: standard
Make sure the standard caching level is enabled – it’s recommended in most cases. But feel free to choose another option if you know it works for you.