Cloudflare Optimization Feature (Total Disaster)

  • Resolved jetxpert

    (@jetxpert)


    5 years, 5 months ago

    The Cloudflare Optimization feature added to your plugin starting with Version 5.7.0 dramatically affected our website (loading speed, TTFB, etc). It created other issues as well.

    Background:

    We currently use Cloudflare’s (CF) Pro Plan and have twelve (12) Page Rules.

    Issues:

    (1) When we activated your CF feature, your plugin deleted (destroyed) all of our Page Rules. We confirmed this within CF dashboard. Yes, we were warned as noted here, but with other untold consequences.

    (2) Your CF feature does not give users an opportunity to restore their Page Rules shall they decide not to use it later.

    (3) Your CF feature injects a Workers code into website headers as shown here.

    (4) Your CF feature injects a Workers file into our CF dashboard as shown here.

    (5) Your CF feature causes our website cache to be REVALIDATED all the time as shown here, thus loading and/or response times have increased dramatically on all of our website pages. Many page loading times doubled!

    (6) Your CF feature does not give users an opportunity to change or update their Page Rules because it deletes them.

    (7) Cloudflare Workers is not 100% free. We are worried that – as Pro Plan users – we may get charged in the future for this unexpected, forced feature.

    Our Fix:

    (1) We deauthenticated then disabled your CF feature.

    (2) We deleted the sg_worker file created by your plugin located inside our CF dashboard.

    (3) We re-created all of our Page Rules.

    (4) We deleted all cache (local and global)

    (5) We reactivated WP Rocket’s Cloudflare feature (works like a charm).

    Urgent Recommendations:

    (1) Please fix your plugin to address the above issues.

    (2) Make sure users have an opportunity to restore their CF Page Rules.

    (3) Update your documentation to clearly state the impact of your CF feature.

    Was your CF feature ever beta-tested with actual clients of yours? Your CF feature took away our control of many CF options in the back-end. Not good!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Hristo Pandjarov

    (@hristo-sg)

    SiteGround Representative

    5 years, 5 months ago

    There is no difference between the end result of using workers or page rules regarding page load if everything is working properly. If your TTFB was affected this means that something on your site was not working properly and the CF cache on the edges was bypassing.

    Regarding your comments:

    1. Yes, we delete page rules because they break functionality. There is an explicit warning about this before you proceed.

    2. We configure Cloudflare via an API there is no backup functionality in configurations and such won’t be added. If you have speciffic needs, make sure you keep track on your configuration.

    3,4,5. Yes, we use workers. Page rules work only for static sites unless you pay for the business account and get the bypass on cookie functionality. As I said in the beginning the end result of a page properly cached is the same, workers only handle cache busting. This confirms my suspision that your site is sending headers blocking configuration, probably some .htaccess rules regarding HTML expiration? You should check that.

    6. Yes. We can’t assure the poper plugin functionality if you are adding custom page rules that can overwrite things like cache busting for example.

    7. They are not. However, their limits of 100,000 requests/day and 1000 requests/min are way above what you should be able to handle with your account anyway. For more, you can simply upgrade.

    To sum up, your particular site configuration broke the plugin functionaity which works fantastic. Yes, it was beta tested on a number of live sites and so far it performs great.

    I will try to update the warning message about what gets deleted and put some bold text here and there 🙂

    Thread Starter jetxpert

    (@jetxpert)

    5 years, 5 months ago

    @hristo-sg,

    Thank you so much for your detailed reply.

    Based on your input, research and experience, here’s what we can conclude from using SG Optimizer’s Cloudflare feature (fairly new at this point):

    (1) Page Rules will be deleted. User’s will no longer have control over them nor be able to implement back-end Page Rule customizations using Cloudflare’s dashboard.

    (2) Websites will slow down dramatically if they don’t meet the testing configuration used by SiteGround.

    (3) There is no data nor documentation supporting the benefits of this feature nor explaining the impact of it. We checked links below and they contain absolutely no information about it. We believe this feature was implemented for the sole benefit of reducing SG’s shared server loads.

    https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/wordpress/sg-optimizer/

    (Screenshot of SG Tutorial’s Menu: http://prntscr.com/vdfcj6)

    https://www.siteground.com/blog/sg-optimizer-new-version/

    For now, as mentioned before, we’ll leave this feature deactivated and use CF directly. Our website is a lot faster (locally and globally) without your new feature.

    Again, thank you for your detailed reply.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

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