Cloudflare is an amazing service which not only secures your website but also improves its performance. However it’s important to know that adding cloudflare to your site doesn’t mean that it will go from 10 seconds load time to 1 second, just by enabling cloudflare. There is more to website speed than simply enabling a cdn.
So if there isn’t much speed improvement or difference when you’ve enabled cloudflare, how can you tell if it’s working or not? Well there are a few methods, lets discuss them.
How can I tell if CloudFlare is caching my site or a specific file?
There are a few methods to check that, including:
1. Check analytics stats in Cloudflare dashboard
- Login to your cloudflare account
- Select your domain name
- Click “analytics” from top icons
And it will show you the visitors for your site for last 24 hours, week, month or so on in the form of a graph like this (image below)
If you can see the visitors in analytics, it means that cloudflare is working for your site and the visitors are going through cloudflare server using this account.
2. Check the source code of your webpage (if using rocket loader)
Another good way is to check the source code of your website if you’re using rocket loader, you will see the rocket loader script in the source code.
3. Using webpagetest to check headers of cached page
An easy way is to check your site headers of the page you want to be using cloudflare.
Simply goto webpagetest.org and check for your website url and run the test.
Once the test is complete, check the response headers of the resources and they should include this line if cloudflare is caching it:
CF-Cache-Status: HIT
4. Using terminal to verify if cloudflare is active
Another option is to check it through the terminal. If you have terminal, you can check the particular resource of page for being cached using cloudflare by using this command:
curl -svo /dev/null http://domain.com/filename.extension
Change the domain name to your domain name and the filename to the filename if you’re checking any specific file or page. Extension has to be replaced with the file extension like html, jpg, etc.
If the command returns a status with “miss” it means that cloudflare isn’t caching that resource.
Expired status means that this resource isn’t in the cache anymore.
Please note that simply disabling the cloudflare plugin on your wordpress sit doesn’t disable cloudflare. You need to either turn the development mode on, or else change the name servers directly to the server again in order to stop your traffic from being routed through cloudflare server.
If you’re using bluehost, you need to turn off cloudflare from the bluehost admin panel.
If you’re confused about any step and want my services to fix it or configure cloudflare for your site you can contact me through: I will Setup cloudflare CDN for your website.