What is the effect of CloudFlare CDN on page load speeds, hosting IP location and the ultimate SEO effect?

[uworlds]

Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe?

I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal?

I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN?  In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it?

I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans).

I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankings

I do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above?

Many thanks!
Mark

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Mark,

First of all, have you tested your sites to see how they are in terms of speed? I would suggest checking with...

• Google Page Speed Insights
• GTMetrix
• Pingdom

My own personal experience is that it can cause real issues in terms of page load times - to the point I have had clients drop it altogether. Out side of that, I can't advise on the best way to utilise it.

Are you finding that your experience is a good or bad one so far?

-Andy

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[uworlds]

Hi Andy,
Thanks so much for that.

It is really hard for me to tell what the user's experience is since I am in Australia and users are in 7 other countries and I am not sure how to determine the UX of a person in another city.

To me it seems the sites are serving fast enough even for me here; but since the Web is so hyper-competitive, I am just trying to fine tune in every conceivable area as much as possible, with the belief that lots of little things added up is a good thing, even if they are not the top 3 determining factors of ranking but still important.

In some cases, certain sites only allow users to join if they are within a particular city so the site is totally city-specific.  In this case it may make sense to not use CloudFlare but just buy hosting within that city with that city's IP address.   Would that be true?   It seems to me that a site for people in a certain city only would get better rankings if it's server's IP address was within the same city?
CloudFlare does have a server in this city as well.

I have experienced seeing some subdomains serving so slowly through CloudFare that a warning page comes up that it could not be served (page fail) ... yet with CF suppressed, the pages serve fine, so this is a concern, but maybe it was a random instance I'm not really sure.

Thing is, because of the protection of CloudFlare it feels better to have it in place(?)

My main concern is also centred around the idea that if content is cached and distributed over dozens of servers on a CDN ... and we do a "Who's hosting" the domain and it says 'CloudFlare' then for SEO purposes in terms of serving the most relevant content to people in their local area, then how does the IP address of the hosting affect ranking within a local area?   In other words, if some content is cached (e.g. images) and served via CF and the rest of the content is HTML and not cached and served from the origin server ... in effect, 'where is the home of the site' i.e. if the site is hosted in the UK because most of its customer base is in the UK (but also in other countries) then how do rankings for keywords work in the UK compared to other countries?   I would think without CF the site would appear more UK-specific and UK-centric; but with CF in place ... the context of the hosting is totally lost / confused?

Many thanks for your assistance.

Best regards,
Mark

[uworlds]

Hi Josh,
Thank you very much for your kind assistance!  Makes sense.
I posted a reply to another response above, where I guess I fleshed out my concerns perhaps a bit better (sorry it's a very confusing thing for me to sort out here).   I would be very interested and grateful to hear your comments on it.
Have a great day.
Mark

[uworlds]

P.S.  All 148 of my sites are hosted in the US.   I guess the reason I am asking is that it has been hideously time-consuming setting up all these sites that to break them up into all sorts of locally-based hosting plans would take me weeks of fiddling, down-time etc. which I've already gone though earlier this year.   I moved things via CloudFlare because some sites were hacked so it sent me down a wormhole of trying to learn Web security and put best practices in place.   So it's not like I have one site to move somewhere ... any answer may have huge implications in terms of the effort required to put best practices in place for all my sites.   Many thanks again!

[uworlds]

Hi Andy,

How can I test page load speed if when using the tool above, it does not recognise where I am?   It seem to think I am in a different location globally each time I try.

Thanks so much,

Mark

[Andy.Drinkwater]

With most of these you can't Mark. You can set a different country on Pingdom, but that is about as much flexibility that you get.

-Andy

[uworlds]

Thanks Andy, sorry I just noticed the settings button where you can pick the international locations, it wasn't obvious to me before.

Whichever page I choose, http://theatrebuddies.us it is taking between 2 and 4 seconds to load, which doesn't seem great?

I am not sure if this is a hosting issue or something to do with javascript on the page which affects load time, it's very hard to say.

I wonder if anyone can recommend a Web host with the fastest possible shared hosting, if that has anything to do with it and I could set up a plan and load one page and do a comparison.

Many thanks again.

• Mark

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Mark,

Have you run the site through Page Speed Insights? What does Google suggest? It might be that you can get some good speed increases just by making .htaccss changes.

-Andy

[uworlds]

Hey thanks Andy,

I have learned a few things regarding the Page Speed Insights and was able to make a few changes regarding expiry times on cache, which increased the score.

I will tweak the suggestions some more to try to get the score to 100/100 for Mobile and Desktop, if that's possible to get 100/100.

Thanks for letting me know about that.

Regards,
Mark

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Well good luck with 100/100 but you should be good to get a 90-ish score.

-Andy