Checking the benefit is real.
WHAT TO MEASURE BEFORE
Page load time, from a testing tool, at a location representative of your visitors Server resource usage in cPanel Bandwidth usage
Record the figures. Without a baseline you cannot judge.
WHAT TO MEASURE AFTER
The same three, a week later.
WHAT SHOULD IMPROVE
Bandwidth from your account, substantially, since assets are served by Cloudflare Load times for visitors far from the server Resource usage, if bot traffic was significant
WHAT MAY NOT CHANGE
Page generation time, unless you configured HTML caching Load times for visitors near the server Resource usage, if your traffic is legitimate and uncached
CLOUDFLARE'S OWN ANALYTICS
Shows requests served from cache versus passed to us, and traffic blocked.
The cache hit ratio tells you how much is actually being served at the edge.
IF NOTHING IMPROVED
Check what is actually cached. A low hit ratio means the configuration is not doing much.
The first thing to check is whether server-side caching is enabled at all.
