Web performance encompasses a lot of things: page load time, responsiveness for web and mobile applications. But overall, the key element is response times. How quickly can the origin server or the cache fulfill a user request? How quickly can a DNS response reach the client device?
The Cloudflare mission is to help build a better Internet to everyone, and we offer multiple services for boosting the speed and performance of our customers and users. Cloudflare is faster than the competition when it comes to accelerating performance.
How site speed impacts the bottom line
There is a lot of research out there that confirms what many businesses and web developers already know: speed affects revenue. Better web performance means better user engagement and more conversions. Better performance also results in better SEO, driving up overall traffic numbers and increasing lead generation, sales, or ad revenue.
One study by Google and Bing concluded that on average, a two-second delay in a website's page rendering led to a 4.3% loss in revenue per visitor. Another independent study has shown that 1 additional second of load time reduces conversions by 7%.
How does using Cloudflare affect performance?
According to testing from Cedexis (a company that evaluates CDN performance):
- Cloudflare is over 50 milliseconds or 23% faster than the nearest competitor over HTTPS for the 95th percentile
- Cloudflare performs better than all competitors over HTTPS at both the 50th and 95th percentile
- Cloudflare performs better than all competitors over HTTP at both the 50th and 95th percentile
Translating domain names into IP addresses quickly and with authority needs an enterprise-ready DNS. Each webpage requires multiple requests and responses in order to load, so an improvement of even a few milliseconds in how DNS queries are answered adds up quickly. That's why it's so important to us that our DNS resolvers are the fastest available. According to DNSPerf (a DNS performance benchmarking service):
- Cloudflare is the fastest authoritative DNS provider, 30% faster globally than the next-fastest competitor
- Cloudflare is the fastest public resolver, almost 30% faster globally than the next-fastest public DNS resolver
We've seen this in action; customers have reported large performance gains as a result of implementing Cloudflare. Zendesk, for example, improved their response times by 10x, and OKCupid was able to cut their page load times by up to 50% by implementing Cloudflare.
How Cloudflare technology boosts business results
Cloudflare has a wide range of customers, from small businesses to large enterprises, but across all of them there's a similar story: Users engage more, convert more, and bounce less when content renders quickly. For instance, improving page load speed resulted in 62% more conversions for U.S. Xpress. Bidu grew leads by 30% year over year by reducing average full page load times from 13 seconds to 2.3 seconds.
Our innovative products and services help speed up applications and websites:
- Argo: Cloudflare Argo uses smart routing to find the fastest, least congested path across the Cloudflare network.
- CDN: The Cloudflare globally distributed CDN caches web content across 165+ global data centers to supercharge web performance.
- DNS: Cloudflare DNS services shave crucial milliseconds off requests for a DNS lookup.
- Load Balancing: Cloudflare balances traffic across multiple servers or regions and uses health checks to identify offline servers.
- Web Optimizations: Cloudflare optimizes web content delivery by bundling JavaScript files, leveraging local storage, adjusting cache headers automatically, and more.
Improving page speed and performance results in higher conversion rates, better user engagement. Cloudflare provides the fastest performance for web applications.
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