- Hey guys, my name is Christian Taylor.
Welcome back to Craylor Made,
where I like to talk about all things branding, marketing and entrepreneurship.
So if you can't tell, I'm kind of a fan of CloudFlare.
Now, CloudFlare is a free CDN and DNS management system.
If you don't know what that is, or what that means,
I made a video just about CloudFlare,
and I also made a video talking about DNS;
it was actually my last video.
So go ahead and check those out first.
But if you're using CloudFlare, and you're a fan,
this week was big for CloudFlare because it was their birthday week.
And that's usually where they announce a lot of new products and settings and services.
And that's exactly what they did this week.
So here's what studs me most.
This week, CloudFlare released their Automatic Platform Optimization service.
Now this is particularly interesting,
because I've said before that CloudFlare is a totally free service,
and while they do offer paid plans, which start at $20 per month per domain name,
which is pretty pricey for what I do,
I don't know about what you do.
But for me, it's not really something that makes sense for me.
CloudFlare APO is their first paid add-on that you can use on the free plan;
available at $5 a month per website.
So, what is CloudFlare APO?
Well, it's really a glorified cache.
Since CloudFlare is a content delivery network,
this means they cache the little things:
like the logo on your site, font files, and CSS files,
and they store them on all of their servers around the world.
CloudFlare says, "With APO for WordPress,
your customers won't suffer any slowness caused by common issues:
like shared hosting congestion, slow database lookups, or misbehaving plugins."
When someone types in your domain name,
it looks at the closest CloudFlare server geographically to them,
and it pulls those files that are cached, it gets the logo file from there.
So CloudFlare APO is taking this a step further.
with new integration with WordPress,
where every time you make a change to your WordPress site,
such as creating a new page or changing the logo,
there's a WordPress plugin that CloudFlare offers,
and it refreshes the cache and updates the assets on CloudFlare servers.
CloudFlare APO uses some fancy stats like a 72% reduction in time to first byte,
23% reduction to first contentful paint,
and 13% reduction in speed index for desktop users at the 90th percentile.
This is where I started to kind of wonder about CloudFlare APO,
I mean, I don't really know what any of this stuff means.
Do you know what it means?
What does it mean to be at the 90th percentile?
Maybe someone from CloudFlare will see this,
and comment on the video with an explanation.
But, all I see is it's $5 a month, it's for WordPress,
and supposedly it makes your website faster for everyone.
So I decided to try it, and you get to try it too.
Because honestly, I'm a little bit torn on if APO really does much of anything.
I definitely do see a slight speed improvement on my website.
But with where I am located in relation to my web server,
I don't see a huge improvement.
And it could be that I just have a basic website, and there's not a whole lot to load.
I think one of the biggest benefits to APO,
which I'm not able to test on my own,
is the speed at which your site loads for international users.
If you have a big international viewer base,
and your blog or store is viewed from users all around the world,
then I bet APO would make a bigger difference,
where it may load mostly the same speed if you're in the US,
and your web servers are in the US.
If someone in the UK goes to load your site,
I bet using APO would make a big difference.
So go look at the links in the description below.
I've got two links to the same exact website hosted on the same exact server.
The only difference is one website uses CloudFlare's APO service which is $5 a month,
The other website still uses CloudFlare CDN,
but the free version, so I'm not paying for APO.
Now, yes, CloudFlare APO is only available for WordPress right now.
The company says that they are going to work on expanding it to future platforms.
So maybe we'll see it offered for Shopify and Squarespace and other sites.
That's not the only thing CloudFlare announced this week though;
they did also announce CloudFlare radar, which I think is super cool.
You can now see public stats for the entire CloudFlare network,
such as what the top performing domain is in CloudFlare,
and there's a ton of domains and sites that use CloudFlare,
or the overall traffic pattern on the internet.
Imagine how fun it would be to look at CloudFlare radar on Black Friday,
and just see like what hours of the day people are shopping at:
Is it like all day, is there heavy traffic at midnight when maybe the deals start.
There's a lot of fun stuff that you can learn fromCloudFlare radar.
It's kind of like Google's public keywords tool that they offer,
but for the CloudFlare network.
And I think that's pretty cool.
There was also CloudFlare TV announced,
so you can now go to a website and look at:
some resources, webinars, there's free live videos that you can watch,
and learn about websites and content delivery and online security.
That's very cool.
And finally, for any of you CloudFlare Pro users,
they announced support for AVIF image optimization.
Now again, it's pro only, but if you don't know what that is,
it's a really good way to optimize images on websites,
and make them as small as possible, but still look high quality.
I gotta be honest, I'm kind of jealous of this.
I looked at the CloudFlare blog when they introduced this,
and they showed a JPEG file, a WEBP file, and an AVIF image file,
right next to each other, the same size and the AVIF file just looks so much better,
more vibrant, less compressed, and they're the same size.
So that means you can get your images down really small on your website,
it's going to load a ton faster, because images and how big they are,
probably make the biggest difference with load time on your website,
and CloudFlare does this all automatically if you have a pro plan,
they can just optimize the images and you never have to think about it.
So that was the exciting news from CloudFlare Birthday week.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
And if you use CloudFlare, I'd love to know.
Are you interested in APO?
Did you see a difference in speed with the APO comparison,
at the links in the description below?
If you did see a difference,
could you justify spending $5 a month per website for your setup.
It may be worth it if you're using WP engine or a premium web host.
I mean, if you're paying $30 to $50 a month for hosting, what's another $5 a month,
for the best optimization that you could get from CloudFlare?
But if you're just hosting a blog, and maybe you've got hosting with NameCheap or Dreamhost,
and you're paying $5 a month for web hosting,
well, you're going to double your hosting cost effectively to have this service.
So I'm really curious what you think.
As always, if you like this video, do be sure to hit the subscribe button,
and click the bell so you don't miss when I release new videos.
With that said, I will catch you guys next time.