There’s no way of getting around the fact that I am a Cloudflare fan. No company is perfect, and Cloudflare is no exception, but by and large their products and internet citizenship are exceptional. There is a lot to say about how well their Web Application Firewall, content delivery network (CDN), and Domain Name System (DNS) services work. All those services have made our client’s products better, but it wasn’t until I started using Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) that I became the fan that I am today.
We build a fair amount of WordPress websites, which comes with the responsibility of optimizing for both security and speed. Out of the box WordPress is fine for a personal website, but when you start building business logic and dozens (if not hundreds) of pages it starts to get bogged down pretty quickly.
Optimizing for Users, Clients and Functionality
When we started working on the MultiCare website we knew that we were building a WordPress site that would get millions of hits a month on hundreds of pages. Optimizing the site was going to be important for a few reasons:
- First, we wanted users to have a good experience on the site
- Secondly, we wanted to make sure our client was happy
- And lastly, we needed to make sure that the amount of traffic wasn’t detrimental to the functionality of the web servers.
Using Cloudflare as a CDN was always part of the plan, but we were also looking at adding another caching layer — using Varnish — between Cloudflare and the server. We decided to push image hosting over to Cloudinary so that we didn’t have to serve images as well as dynamic content. There was nothing extraordinary about that plan, in fact lots of large scale WordPress sites are engineered in exactly the same way. The rub was that we’d never used Varnish and from all the research we’d done it was pretty clear that it needed to be optimized itself before it would be really useful. We could have done the research and gotten Varnish working smoothly, but at about the same time Cloudflare introduced APO.
Fast Web Pages, Happy Users
APO takes Cloudflare’s website caching service and turns it up to 11. If you have a WordPress site without any dynamic content — i.e. content that changes on every page load like a search results page — essentially APO makes your user-facing site into a static site. The way they do this is that they cache your entire site on their network of a couple hundred local nodes. So when a user goes to your site rather than having the request hit your server — that could be located on the other side of the country or globe — it hits the node closest to you. This makes your site incredibly fast. Any requests that need to go through to the server do, but all the static content is coming out of the Cloudflare cache closest to the user. Your site data coming from the closest node means the page loads faster and your users are happier because they can get to business using your site rather than waiting for it.
APO is the Answer
APO solved all of the optimization problems we needed to solve. It made the site really fast, because of the reasons mentioned above. It also made it so that our servers are only handling about a third of the traffic the site sees with Cloudflare’s cache handling the rest. And lastly, the client is happy with the site they’ve got.
Since launching the MultiCare website we’ve used APO on several smaller websites with similar results. In fact, on websites that have little to no dynamic content they’re as fast as when we run them locally on our development servers.
There are many other reasons I am a Cloudflare fan from Super Bot Fight Mode to the Web Application Firewall to Access — their Zero Trust System. But for me APO was the revelation that made using Cloudflare absolutely necessary for nearly every WordPress site we launch.
