CloudFlare Recap: I [Don't] Like It

By pdo | Published: February 28, 2011

A few months ago, I signed up for CloudFlare and added this blog to their service.  At first, I was terrified.  I hate messing with DNS settings.  Then I was jubilant — my bandwidth was down about 40%.  Next I was worried, because traffic dropped dramatically.  Finally, I was upset — Google had cut me off.  It’s been about two months since the last post.  Here’s what’s happening now.

Traffic is back

I don’t think I can honestly blame CloudFlare for this one.  Yeah, it happened after I turned them on, but it didn’t happen immediately after.  Google seems to have recalculated my blog’s value a little after I switched over, and I wasn’t ranking as highly for some of my higher-traffic terms (increasing AdSense revenue, updating your 2WIRE router to use WPA2, and pre-paid Android phones).  Honestly, I hadn’t touched on those topics for a few weeks, and that probably hurt me.

Performance is good

As measured by Pingdom, response times are still under a second for most requests.  They’re not as low as before CloudFlare, but they’re plenty good.  And bandwidth usage is still way down, which is phenomenal.

Conclusions

I’m happy with CloudFlare.  They have a great product and have seen impressive results.  I’m using them on other blogs, but I’m still a little hesitant about switching over Dappered.  We’ll see what the future brings.  If Dappered’s traffic keeps growing like it has been, we’ll have to do something.

Update: Here’s a chart showing my drop in search traffic and its recovery.  This is Traffic Sources > Search Engines in Google Analytics.  Good question, Debbie.

 

Search Traffic Drop and Recovery

Update: I added the [don't] in the headline.  I’ve turned CloudFlare off on this site.  And check the comments — Anurag is having the same problem as Debbie and me.  That makes the traffic drop a pretty serious, pretty consistent issue.

This entry was posted in The Google, The Internets and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.
  • Debbiem

    Hi Paul,

    You didn’t mention if your traffic from Google every recovered… I am experiencing the same problem having switched to Cloudflare. In your experience is it just a temporary issue, or something to be worried about?

    Thanks,

    Debbie

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

    Debbie, I added a graph to show the dip and the recovery. For me, it was temporary.

  • Pagehelp

    Hmmm… seems like you lost a good bit of traffic for a month or more as a result of the switch. For us Adsense earners, that’s a big hit. I wish I had never heard of them…

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

    Can you share a snapshot of your traffic data? If you’re using Google Analytics, it’d be awesome to add your data to the post. You can share a graphic with http://imgur.com/.

    I’m still not sure if this is a common thing or a rare occurrence. Anybody do the switch without an issue?

  • http://www.facebook.com/hckanurag Anurag Choudhari

    Same thing is happening with me, should i just keep the cloudflare as it is ?
    or i have to do something to get back the search engine traffic?
    also adsense revenue is decreased almost by 80%..

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

    Sorry to hear this, Anurag. I’ve stopped using CloudFlare and no longer recommend it. I had to wait it out a number of weeks until my Google traffic rebounded. Unless you have a serious bandwidth issue, I’d turn it off.

    http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/2011/should-you-use-cloudflare-im-not-anymore/

  • Anonymous

     Same thing happened to me for a client, but I didn’t notice until I came across this blog post:

    http://i.imgur.com/NB0F7.png

    Looks like my traffic bounced back after a few weeks.

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

     Wild.  At this point, I’d love to hear from somebody that has NOT had this problem.  Anyone?

  • http://www.husdal.com/ Jan Husdal

    Thanks for an interesting post. I’ve had CloudFlare on my site for 3 days only, so it’s a bit early to draw a clear conclusion, but so far the results are as follows:

    Average site speed (monitored by pingdom.com every 60 mins) improved from 1.3 secs to 0.3 secs – impressive
    Bounce rate dropped from 70% to 35% on the first day, but crawled back to 70% – not sure why this happened
    Number of visitors/Time on site/Pages per visit – no impact so far

    I’m quite happy with CloudFlare and I intend to leave it on, but I’ll come back and let you know if something strange happens…

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

    Keep us posted if you see anything odd like the rest of us.  Best of luck!

  • Txgaritano

    When I turned on cloudflare for my site the bounce rate decreced from 60% to 5%, good news!, but three days after my traffic and adsense revenues went down 95%, terrible.

    I DEFINITELY DON’T RECOMMEND CLOUDFLARE TO ANYBODY.

  • http://technicallyeasy.net Paul Salmon

    Interesting.  I have used CloudFlare for several months, and not one time did I see a dip in either earnings or traffic.  In fact, my traffic has actually increased over time. The only that did decrease was my response time, which was reduced to half.

    So I’m confused as to why you would see a drop in traffic, mainly since CloudFlare speeds up your site’s response time and basically serves cached content to your visitors.

  • http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/ Paul David Olson

    Conceptually, I agree with everything you’re saying, but in practice, I (and others) saw a traffic hit.  I use W3 Total Cache, so my response times were pretty great before:

    http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/2010/w3-total-cache-and-site-response-time-as-measured-by-pingdom/ 

    Want to share a screenshot of your analytics?  

  • http://www.husdal.com Jan Husdal

    Just a follow-up. Nothing odd, but I decided to switch to Incapsula for better security (only if you pay at CloudFlare, but free at Incapsula). Perfomancewise they seem about the same:
    http://www.husdal.com/2011/07/01/incapsula-versus-cloudflare/

  • http://twitter.com/caprismart Narayanaswamy

    Disabling Right now….was actually wat was going wrong….got it right! I’m sure the flurry of “Cloudflare Rocks” posts will fade away in sometime. Great Post! :)

  • Mike

    Hi,

    I have noticed a dropoff in both Adsense Earnings and Traffic after switching DNS to Cloudflare. The drop is about 50% in both.. 

    I have played around with them before and agree, there is an improvement in pageload, but the loss in other areas is a concern. Wasnt until today that I suspected Cloudflare to be the issue and found your post.

    Needless to say I have switched them off for now to see if it will recover.

    Image attached.
    http://i.imgur.com/m83p4.jpg

  • http://iluluonline.com/ iLuLuOnline

    I’m having the same issues with revenue and traffic…I’ve decided to remove it from my site once and for all!

  • Big Geek Daddy

    I’ve been using CloudFlare for a couple weeks now without any issues.  They have been responsive to my questions and concerns.  One thing to be careful with is their Beta Programs (Auto Minify & Rocket Loader) as like many such programs they can cause issues.