Cloudflare + CDN vs Just cloudflare?

[tyealia]

I was recently doing speed optimization on my site when i stumbled on a great comparison article. This person compares multiple cdns and cloudflare and finds that cloudflare coupled with a cdn on average increased load time in every instance regardless of what cdn was used.

https://wpdingo.com/fastest-maxcdn-cloudflare-caching-combo

Now this is opposite what other articles are telling me which is use both a cdn and cloudflare for speed. According too this looks like a cdn coupled with cloudflare increases load times, so its better to just stick with cloudflare.

Anyone done any personal tests on sites they own?

 

[CCarter]

Why would you combine Cloudflare and another CDN? Cloudflare IS a CDN already.

 

[chanilla]

You can't pay attention to these fucking review sites... it's called pay to play man.

Shaving .2 off of your load time is a waste of time to configure all that bullshit. And btw, there is no way in hell Siteground shared hosting is faster than LightningBase with CF.

What you really want is Railgun. It will eliminate the need for all those extra plugins, and if you use a host that preconfigures it for you with something like Varnish for server side caching, no wordpress plugin is going to come close to that setup. (not to mention, a LOT less fiddling around with settings)

 

[Sakshamk117ue]

Use Cloudflare for CDN only and use a dedicated CDN. You will get the best speeds provided that you have done proper optimizations.

 

[tyealia]

Why would you combine Cloudflare and another CDN? Cloudflare IS a CDN already.

Im getting a bit confused from all their help pages but they did mention on the cloudflare page that they are not a full CDN and they compliment another cdns like maxcdn for better results. You can see this by inspecting element and seeing all your links are still hosted on your wordpress if you use cloudflare whereas if you add a cdn like amazon cloudfront all your images will be hosted on their site.

What they said is cloudflare acts like a proxy between your website and content and takes snapshots of frequented pages to serve up faster, whereas a cdn like amazon cloudfront would pull your files onto their servers and inspecting element you would see something like cdn.cloudfront.sfa02993428092 etc etc.

According to them complimenting cloudflare with a cdn is optimal.

 

[Calamari]

Cloudflare will cache your images and serve them from their servers. With cloudflare your images are still being served from a cloudflare server that is closer to the user. The only difference is that your images aren't fully hosted on their server, it's still hosted on yours.

Can you link us to what you're reading on cloudflare where they recommend that. Sounds redundant to me.