Diagnose common site performance issues
Overview
You can access performance options in the Speed app of the Cloudflare dashboard.
If your site loads slowly, use the following steps to troubleshoot:
- Examine your origin web server for excess load or traffic. Ask your hosting provider to help review your origin web server health.
- Use webpagetest.org to confirm whether the slowness occurs via Cloudflare or directly at your origin web server.
- Review Cloudflare options to optimize performance.
Test performance with Webpagetest.org
You can use webpagetest.org to troubleshoot speed issues. webpagetest.org tests site speed and provides data on resource load time (images, CSS, HTML etc). webpagetest.org helps rule out local Internet issues such as a poor Internet connection.
To assess the cause of slowness:
- run a test with Cloudflare
- test direct to your origin web server
- review page load speed results
Test with Cloudflare
If Cloudflare is currently enabled to proxy your site traffic (not temporarily paused or grey-clouded), determine your page speed through Cloudflare:
1. Visit https://www.webpagetest.org/.
2. Choose a geographic Test Location and a Browser that closely matches the browser and location of your visitor experiencing slow page loads.
3. Enter the URL for a slow loading page and click START TEST.
4. Copy the browser URL to your completed test results in case you need to open a ticket with Cloudflare support.
Test directly to your origin web server
Temporarily pause Cloudflare or grey-cloud the subdomain’s DNS record in the Cloudflare DNS app to test performance while bypassing Cloudflare:
1. Visit https://www.webpagetest.org/.
2. Choose a geographic Test Location and a Browser as your Test with Cloudflare.
3. Enter the same URL as used for your Test with Cloudflare and click START TEST.
4. Copy the browser URL to your completed test results in case you need to open a ticket with Cloudflare support.
Review page load speed results
Review your average page load speed:
- Click Plot Full Results under Performance Results.
- Scroll to Load Time and review the Mean time.
- Compare the following between the Cloudflare and direct-to-origin tests:
- If Mean page load to the origin server is slower than through Cloudflare, investigate the source of slowness with your hosting provider.
- Slowness for only the first request of a resource indicates your server took too long to generate a response. The first time a resource is requested, it is likely uncached at Cloudflare and the request has to go to your origin server. Investigate slowness with your hosting provider.
- If Mean page load to the origin server is faster than through Cloudflare, open a Cloudflare support ticket providing the following details:
- The slow URL
- The webpagetest.org URLs you compared. Provide the direct URL links to test results, rather than a screenshot or attachment.
- A traceroute to your domain.
4. Review Cloudflare options to optimize performance.