sellPerformance

speed

Speed

From smart routing to image, JS, and CSS optimization — make every page faster.

~30%Faster with Argo Smart Routing

3Core Web Vitals tracked

1-clickTo apply many fixes

330+Edge cities optimizing

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What is Cloudflare Speed?

Speed is Cloudflare's hub for measuring how fast your website really is and turning on optimizations to make it faster. It includes Observatory (performance testing with real and synthetic data), smart routing across Cloudflare's private network, and a set of content optimizations for images, JavaScript, and CSS.

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Think of it like GPS plus a tune-up

Argo Smart Routing is like live-traffic GPS that always picks the least congested road across Cloudflare's backbone. The content optimizations are like a car tune-up — shrinking images and code so your pages carry less weight and arrive sooner.

Many speed features are one click in the dashboard, and several are on automatically once your site is proxied through Cloudflare.

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Core Web Vitals explained

Core Web Vitals are three measurements Google uses to score real user experience. Cloudflare reports them so you know exactly what to improve.

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LCP — loading

Largest Contentful Paint: how long until the biggest thing on screen (often the hero image or headline) appears. Aim for under 2.5 seconds.

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INP — responsiveness

Interaction to Next Paint: how quickly the page reacts when a user taps or clicks. Aim for under 200 milliseconds.

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CLS — visual stability

Cumulative Layout Shift: how much the page jumps around as it loads. Lower is better; aim for under 0.1.

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What optimizations are available?

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Argo Smart Routing

Detects congestion in real time and routes traffic over the fastest path across Cloudflare's private backbone — averaging around 30% faster than the public internet.

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Tiered Cache

Adds an upper layer of cache so fewer requests reach your origin, raising your cache hit ratio.

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Image optimization

Polish compresses images and can convert them to modern formats like WebP; image resizing serves the right size for each device.

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JS & CSS optimization

Minify and streamline JavaScript and CSS so browsers download and run less code.

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Early Hints & Speed Brain

Early Hints lets browsers start fetching key resources sooner; Speed Brain pre-loads the next page a visitor is likely to click.

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Modern protocols

HTTP/3, 0-RTT, and Brotli compression are supported at the edge to cut handshake time and transfer size.

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When should you use it?

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E-commerce

Faster pages directly raise conversions — every 100ms saved can lift sales.

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Global users

Argo Smart Routing helps most when visitors are far from your origin server.

SEO matters to you

Google ranks faster sites higher, and Core Web Vitals are part of the score.

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Image-heavy sites

Galleries, portfolios, and shops benefit hugely from Polish and image resizing.

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How to get started

Run a test in Observatory
In the dashboard go to Speed > Observatory and run a test. You'll get a performance score, Core Web Vitals, and a list of recommended fixes.
Apply the recommendations
Each recommendation links to a setting you can toggle — for example enabling Brotli, Early Hints, or image Polish — usually with a single switch.
Enable Argo Smart Routing
Go to Traffic > Argo Smart Routing and switch it on. It's a paid add-on, but it routes all your proxied traffic over the fastest paths immediately.
Measure real users with Web Analytics
Add Cloudflare Web Analytics so you can watch Core Web Vitals from real visitors over time and confirm your changes helped.

bashCheck that HTTP/3 and Brotli are active

# Verify Brotli compression is being served
curl -sI -H 'Accept-Encoding: br' https://example.com | grep -i content-encoding
# content-encoding: br

# Verify HTTP/3 is advertised
curl -sI https://example.com | grep -i alt-svc
# alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400

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Tips & pricing

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Measure before and after

Always record an Observatory score before you change settings, then re-run it after. Real numbers tell you which toggles actually helped your pages.

Many optimizations (Brotli, HTTP/3, Early Hints, minification) are free on the Free plan.
Argo Smart Routing and some image features are paid add-ons billed by usage.
Fix the biggest Core Web Vital first — usually LCP, driven by your hero image and caching.
Combine Speed with the CDN: caching and routing together give the biggest wins.