How much does improved website speed cost?

Okay, I'll admit that the title of this post sounds a little too sensational. But it fits into a row of posts I've posted before: How much does the worldwide fastest DNS server cost? and How much does a HTTPS certificate cost?. Of course improving a website's speed is a long (and painful!?) process which needs a lot of time and knowledge, but there's a few shortcuts to get you started faster. Like for the other two posts mentioned before, the solution in this case is, again, to put a server in between your users and your servers. CloudFlare's servers to be exact.

What CloudFlare does in this case is several things. Most importantly, they cache everything that is safe to cache - static images for example - so that they are downloaded from their speedy and globally distributed servers instead of your possibly slow (no way!?) servers. Other than caching images, they also optimize them (cutting off unnecessary fat) in the process of caching them. There's more that's being optimized, like shrinking HTML-, CSS- and JavaScript-files but don't leave it to me to explain all of that - go read it directly at CloudFlare.

There's other companies offering similar features of course, but CloudFlare is the one I'm using in production myself, so I can't speak for the others unfortunately.

Here's how to get the most out of CloudFlare!