Cloudflare announced its new Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) service for WordPress sites on October 2, 2020. APO promises to accelerate the speed of WP sites by smart-caching of HTML. By default, Cloudflare caches only ‘static’ content such as CSS, JavaScript, and images, but not HTML. A great thing about the new APO service – it is free if my site is hosted on WordPress.com, and no-additional-cost if I am on a Cloudflare paid plan.
But I use self-hosted WP and the free CF tier. So, for me APO would be $5/month. Is it worth it? I haven’t tried it so I can’t say for sure but … No. Not for me anyway. APO basically does the same thing as my cache-everything page rule, but in a smarter way. If my site had dynamic content, such as user comments or a shopping cart, and if it generated significant revenue, APO would definitely merit at least a trial run. For me, on all but one of my sites, my dumb cache-everything page rule works just fine. My one site with dynamic content (user comments) unfortunately generates no revenue. It would most likely benefit from APO but even a paltry $5/month is too much for me on a personal hobby site.
