@ZenitO Regarding your question and for does who are wondering to ask.
How do I set up Cloudflare properly?
This all depends on what type of site you have, as different settings apply. For example, on a static site, which is just an information site, you can apply a cache to everything rules, and so on. On an e-commerce site, you might want to do a different setting due to the fact that you have more code involved, such as checkout, cart, products, and so on. You don't want to cache does parts of the site, but you can find common rules out there that you can use to speed up your site with Cloudflare.
What is Cloudflare?
Here's a guide for rules for extra security:
https://www.verdanttcs.com/kb/cloudflare-firewall-rules-for-securing-wordpress-websites/
Here's a guide for cache and other extra rules:
https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/cloudflare-page-rules
Does Cloudflare offer a free or paid plan?
The answer is yes, there is no need to use the paid plan unless you use tons of rules or have massive traffic. The free plan is enough to get the job done as long as you have it setup properly.
What do I use to scan websites and get the most out of them?
A lot of people use
GTmetric, but they have limited their free plan, and you need to do a lot of testing if you want to get it right. In my case, I use
SpeedVital. They offer 75 free credits every week for log-in users. Each credit is a scan, so you will have 75 scans every week, which is good to get the most out of your website.
Now why SpeedVital?
They offer a very useful tool that will save you time, which is called
Experiments. Here, you will be able to optimize the site without ever touching your code and block, delay, or defer scripts. All from there, this won't affect your website as this is an experiment scan that will give you the result with things deactivate.
You can also use
Waterfall to see what's causing the loading issue.
Always try linking your site with a Cloudflare plugin. For any changes made to your website, you will be able to purge them from admin. Here are some useful plugins for Cloudflare.
App for Cloudflare (
Recommended) is a free plugin but offers paid pro for extra settings unlock
Super Page Cache for Cloudflare ( 100% free)
Stay away from this one, even though it was created by a Cloudflare developer.
Cloudflare
Hopefully this helps everyone, but remember that everything depends on hosting, themes, plugins, and so on. All sites are different.
Here is a glimpse of some sites I have optimized in the past with the same settings and tools.