Fast Gets Faster as Hummingbird Adds CloudFlare Integration

Another week and another great new feature comes to our performance optimization plugin Hummingbird – full CloudFlare integration!

So, if you haven’t already heard of CloudFlare, go take a look .We think you’ll be really interested in their services (we use them for CampusPress, and Edublogs) and as with all our articles, that’s not an affiliate link – we genuinely do like them a lot!

Basically, through their CDN (Content Delivery Network) CloudFlare provides you with a blazing fast way to serve your website to your visitors, along with protection from their WAF (Website Application Firewall) and other assorted threats, such as DDOS attacks.

So using them on your site is a bit of a no-brainer really, especially as they have a free plan that does the job pretty well and, naturally, we wanted to be able to make sure that WPMU DEV members can enjoy the astonishingly cool speed optimization tools that Hummingbird provides along with the benefits of CloudFlare.

Oh, and we’ve also added LiteSpeed server detection, improved a better JavaScript compressor, added in a neat minification cache clearing function and made a whole bunch of general improvements to the plugin too.

But on with Cloudflare…

Well, That Was Easy!

Getting set up could hardly be easier, just visit the Hummingbird dashboard in your WordPress installation and whack in your CloudFlare email and API key (the global one in “My Settings” on CloudFlare).

Once you’re logged in you’ll be able to enable and disable CloudFlare from the same panel, allowing you to test to see how well it helps your site, and conduct various development tasks without having to leave your WordPress admin area.

Not bad, huh!

But I guess what you would reeeeeally like to know is how it helps your Hummingbird score :)

OK then…

An Honest Test…

I’m not going to show you a result about how I got a 100/100 score or similar because that’s insanely time consuming and hard, and most of us would just prefer something nice and easy!

So, on a rubbish server, with a whole heap of plugins and without even bothering about minification, I thought I’d see what would happen to my local footy club website (that I manage fairly badly!) if I set up CloudFlare (the free plan). And here’s what I managed:

Yep, I went from a pretty sickly 67/100 to 79/100 – an improvement of 12, just from turning on Cloudflare! Which was free! How cool is that :)

Plus, it’s now protected from all sorts of hackery / DDOS nastiness.

This one’s a no-brainer I reckon :)

What’s Next?

Well, how about you tell us what you’d like to see in future Hummingbird releases? We’ve got some plans but it would be great to hear from you.

So go for it… Tell us what you’d like to see next.

Download Hummingbird (for free!) and get CloudFlare (also free!)