Friday, October 7, 2011

Cloudflare rocks

I normally don't post much about the webmastering of LearnThat, but what we recently experienced is so dramatic that I wanted to share it with you.
Like I do regularly, I logged into my analytics and saw this:
A drastic jump in page views. People from one day to the next viewed three times more pages on my site.
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At the same time, the bounce rate, the number of people who leave the site on the first page (which used to be too high), dropped to less than a third:
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Overall, the number of visitors more than doubled!

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Of course, I was delighted! It's rare to see such a drastic improvement, not to mention within a day's time.
When looking at the different things that had changed, and also considering the ominous spike in the middle of September, I found out that we owe big thanks to Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is a new service and I had met Michelle at a local meetup. What she presented seemed too good to be true, but these graphs prove that Cloudflare is very well worth the very low price. 
Cloudflare applies a set of services that help your website in many different ways, but the main one is speed.
By caching the static parts of the site on servers all over the world, the load time is reduced so dramatically that improvements like the ones above materialize!
Now that my site is faster, I actually get to welcome all the visitors who come to us, and they have a much better experience, engaging and reading more, and no longer leaving frustrated by to much load time wait.
Thanks, Cloudflare, keep up the great work!! 
And thanks for making your outstanding service available and affordable to small organizations like ourselves!