One of the biggest networks now using the Internet is Cloudflare. People utilize Cloudflare services to improve the performance and security of their websites and online services.

Get FREE SSL from Cloudflare

1. Create a Cloudflare Account

Go to Cloudflare.com to register your account.

2. Enter Your Website URL

3. Choose a Plan

There is a free plan offered by Cloudflare among its other options. I have been pleased thus far with my free plan. Each plan is described in depth below.

Select Continue, Cloudflare will scan your site DNS. Review it and Continue:

4. Change Your Name Servers

Next, login to your domain portal registration and you can change your name server. Since I’m using ASPHostPortal, so I just need to login my domain portal registration and point my domain to Cloudflare name servers as below:

Any domain registrars have their own settings, so you just need to find name servers section and you can click it and then change your name server to Cloudflare name servers as below:

5. Enable SSL in ASPHostPortal Plesk Windows Hosting

If you don’t enable SSL on your ASPHostPortal Plesk control panel, people won’t be able to access your website. You can run across an HTTP 404 error.

Please go to your Plesk control panel -> hosting settings -> check both checkboxes under Security and Apply.

Please tick 2 options above.

6. Complete Your Cloudflare Settings

Go back to Cloudflare, click on Done, check nameservers and complete the settings.

Select Full mode under SSL/TLS:

As of right now, SSL protects your website. Please be aware that it can take some time for Cloudflare and ASPHostPortal to update on their end; check your website a few hours later.

Bottom Line

With this free SSL from Cloudflare, of course it helps to save on your website maintenance funds. ASPHostPortal is one of the most affordable and reliable ASP.NET hosting service providers. I’ve used their service for years and I can recommend it for those of you who are looking for cost-effective and reliable hosting services.

It should be increase your website speed if you have run above procedure. While these optimizations will help, I definitely recommend you to upgrade your plan to higher plan or purchase their VPS/Cloud dedicated server.

1. Test Your TTFB

KeyCDN measures TTFB in 10 global locations which indicates whether your server is slow. Google flags your TTFB if it’s over 600ms in core web vitals. TTFB affects other metrics too like LCP (largest contentful paint). The main 2 factors are hosting/CDN (ideally with Cloudflare APO).

2. Move To Cloudflare’s DNS

If you registered your domain with GoDaddy, you’re using their DNS which is slow. This increases latency which is also part of TTFB. Cloudflare’s free DNS is faster on dnsperf.com.

1. Sign up for Cloudflare’s free plan, add your website, and run the scan. Cloudflare will walk you through a set of pages until you reach a page where Cloudflare assigns you 2 nameservers.

2. Please login to your domain portal registration and you can point your domain to your Cloudflare name servers. If you unsure how to do this, please kindly contact your domain registrar and you can ask them to point your domain to your Cloudflare name servers.

3. Done

3. Use Cloudflare To Speed Up Your Site

A few tweaks in your Cloudflare dashboard go a long way.

I added some screenshots below to help you configure a few specific settings. I would say this (and your cache plugin) are probably going to be the most high impact optimizations in this list.

• Monitor your bandwidth – in your Analytics settings → Traffic → Bandwidth, you’ll see how much bandwidth you’re offloading to Cloudflare (more is better).
• CDN – in your DNS settings, find your domain in the DNS manager and change the proxy status from DNS Only to Proxied (orange cloud). This activates Cloudflare’s CDN which is performant on cdnperf.com and is needed for other features to work.
• TLS version – in your SSL settings → Edge Certificates, set min. TLS version to 1.2.
• Firewall rules – in your Security settings → Firewall rules, create rules to block access to wp-login, XML-RPC, and even block “spammy” countries. These block unwanted requests to the server and free up resources for more important things.
• Bot protection – in your Security settings → Bots, enable bot fight mode to block spammy bots from hitting your servers. “Good bots” like Google won’t be blocked.
• Early hints – in your Speed settings → Optimization, enable early hints to cut down on server wait time. You will also find several paid features here that can significantly speed up your site such as APO, image optimizations (which almost always do a better job than plugins), and SXGs to improve LCP in core web vitals.
• Browser cache TTL – in your Caching settings → Configuration, set the browser cache TTL to 1 year for static sites (my blog is mostly static so this is what I use) or 1 month for dynamic (eCommerce) sites.
• Crawler hints – in the same setting, enable crawler hints to help Google and other search engines time their crawling more efficiently to save resource consumption.
• Cache everything – in your Rules → Page Rules, you can use a page rule to cache everything (including HTML) which is one of the main ways you get your TTFB low in KeyCDN’s performance test. 
• Hotlink protection – in your Scape Shield settings, enable hotlink protection which stops people from copying your images and using them on their website when they’re still hosted on your server. This can save quite a bit of bandwidth.
• Cloudflare Enterprise – some hosts include Cloudflare Enterprise which is much faster than the free version of Cloudflare since it includes paid features like image optimization, WAF, prioritized routing, and Argo + Tiered Cache. 

4. Host Fonts Locally And Preload Them

Open your PageSpeed Insights (PSI) report and check out the “reduce impact of third-party code” recommendation. If you see fonts.gstatic.com in the report, you need to do this step.

Local fonts are hosted on your server instead of having to pull from fonts.gstatic.com. This is faster and eliminates third-party requests. 

5. Optimize Images

Seeing any of these in your PSI report?

• Properly size images – resize images to correct dimensions. You should do this before uploading them to WP. For example, I resize full width post blog images to 765px width.
• Specify image dimensions – most cache plugins have an option to “add missing image dimensions” which should fix this. Otherwise, you’ll need to manually add a width/height to the image’s HTML. This should improve cumulative layout shift scores in web vitals too.
• Compress images – image CDNs (Cloudflare) are ideal, otherwise a plugin like ShortPixel.
• WebP – again, image CDNs are usually best, or use your WebP/image optimization plugin.
• Adaptive Images – Cloudflare’s image resizing makes it so smaller versions are served to mobile (it can improve your mobile LCP score.

6. Avoid Slow Plugins

Let’s find your slowest plugins.

Open Chrome Dev Tools and go to the coverage report where you’ll see which plugins add the most CSS/JavaScript. The plugin name is usually found in the URL so you’ll know which ones slow down your site the most. As you can see, building sites with page builders and multiple page builder plugins is usually a recipe for disaster. But obviously it depends on your website.

7. Speed Up Your Mobile Site

Mobile speed is a whole tutorial itself, but here we go.

First off, most desktop optimizations carry over to mobile. So make sure your hosting/TTFB, theme, CDN, and cache plugin are in order.

Moving on to mobile-specific optimizations:

• Test your site for mobile layout shifts and fix those.
• Use responsive editors to remove heavy mobile elements.
• Use the Perfmatters script manager to disable unused mobile assets.
• Serve smaller images to mobile via CDN or an adaptive images plugin.
• Use a “load more comments” button if your blog has lots of comments.
• Know when to enable separate mobile cache in your cache plugin, or not.

Conclusion

I hope tutorial above will help you to increase your Asp.net website speed. If you still have issue on your website, you may contact ASPHostPortal directly or you can purchase their dedicated server plan.