What Is Cloudflare WordPress Accelerator

Cloudflare: This new WordPress accelerator makes sites much faster for visitors

Cloudflare says its new service caches a WordPress site’s static and dynamic content for much better performance.

DDoS protection and website accelerator Cloudflare has teamed up with WordPress to launch its new Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) service to speed up a site’s experience for end users.

The new service, which costs $5 a month for WordPress customers on Cloudflare’s Free plan, extends Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) beyond the delivery of static content to include slower-to-fetch dynamic content.

A key metric Cloudflare uses is Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is the first of several hurdles to using its CDN or edge network. If the TTFB is slow, it slows down each remaining step to using the CDN, like compressing images and caching static content.

Cloudflare says APO testing shows a 72% improvement in TTFB for WordPress sites, a 13% improvement on the Speed Index, and a 23% improvement to First Contentful Paint, or how fast users perceive a page to load.

The speed improvements are achieved by caching both static and dynamic content and delivering all a website’s content from Cloudflare’s CDN. Static content includes HTML files and images, while dynamic content changes based on factors like the time a user visits, their location, or the device used.

Dynamic content is usually served from origin servers rather than a cache, and also relies on server-side scripts to generate HTML files in response to events, such as a click on a button or a user login.

Read more here.

Additional Links:

Cloudflare WordPress Official Page