alexhenes wrote:I just signed up for the free CloudFlare account. Do you have an recommendations on CloudFlare settings. Some of the ones that come to mind are:
Just a quick general tip: Unless you are using the special "Extreme Page caching with Cloudflare" as suggested by @GGANG, you should keep Cloudflare settings default/minimal. Cloudflare will essentialy only do two things to your website:
1) Add basic CDN capabilities to static assets (image files)
2) Adds an external layer of protection from certain bots.
Cloudflare, unless using the "Extreme Page caching", will not have any effect on creation time of pages from X3 or even outputting cached pages from X3. Everything still needs to "render" from your server, and cloudflare simply does not cache "pages". Furthermore, most of the additional settings in Cloudflare have no effect in X3, simply because these features are already optimized in X3.
1. Speed.Auto Minify: I don't have any of these set... but it seems like it would be good to check JavaScript, CSS and HTML
All html, css and js in X3 is already minified, so this is not necessary. Furthermore, most of the CSS+JS are loaded from external CDN resources anyway, already minified. It wouldn't really make a difference if you keep it on or off, but it is not required.
2. Speed.Caching Level: Standard
Doesn't make a difference, because X3 does not operate with query strings. Also this setting only affects cacheable items, which in your case is images. The headers in X3 image files are set to 10 years, so Cloudflare
MAY cache the images inevitably on their edge servers ...
3. Browser Cache Expiration: Given that I almost never change pages once they are posted... I am thinking I can set this to a relatively high value. However I don't want this to impact new content that I post... ie. I want new content to be available immediately.
Same as above, doesn't make a difference. Browser cache does not apply for "pages", so new content will always be visible, loaded from your server. X3 uses it's own dynamic server cache to determine if it should output a cached page, or has to recreate a new one ... In either case, it always comes from server. This setting ONLY affects static files (images). X3 already has 10 year caching on image files, which will be passed through to the visitors browser.