MyBB Community Forums

Hi guys,
one of my friend has a small forum - about 500 registered users, 30 max users online, https protocol, mainly text not images in posts.

Lately the website has issues with loading times and availability. 

Personally I use different CDN with monthly plan so I cannot tell him if the free plan offered by Cloudflare will be enough for his purpose. So I would like to ask you what do you think. Thank you very much.

P.S. Is there anything else what is needed to change (except nameservers and ignoring admin access?)? Do you recommend to get better paid plan?

If the load times and availability issues are due to the server then Cloudflare probably wouldn't help - Cloudflare does have "Always Online" functionality, but it's really better suited to static pages, otherwise the cached page that gets served will be out of date, whereas froums really need to show current information.

I think trying to analyse the debug stats from the footer would be a better place to start.

@Matt - thank you for your reply! I told him the same...

Do you have any experiences how much does it help for small forum? I mean use CDN for CSS and static images?

We use it on some sites at work but don't really know how much it benefits specifically forums - I mean, it'll minify HTML, CSS and JS for you, cache assets, it will make it slightly faster to load pages, it won't make it worse, but it probably won't be a massively noticeable difference. It can't be used as a sticking plaster to cover up wider performance issues, basically.

I don't think cloudflare does much work on speeding sites up, to me cloudflare is more of protection. cloudflare gives a small support in page loading just small, if you have a really rapid server, i would stay away from cloudflare as it slows down your site. I would highly recommend using a CDN provider. I'm currently using keycdn.com they are really reliable and fast, you will notice big improvements.

Recommended CDNs:
https://maxcdn.com
https://keycdn.com
https://cdn77.com

I used to use cloudflare
.... my experience: https://community.mybb.com/thread-152949.html