Does Cloudflare Take Away Your Traffic?

Audience Overview - Google Analytics 2013-01-08 00-55-09
This image is in respect to Chair Blog

Does Cloudflare Take Away Your Traffic?

I’m not sure, but on Chair Blog, after I had enabled Google Analytics on January 15, 2012 and had enabled Cloudflare on March 5, 2012, all seemed to go reasonably smooth, until after a peak in visits on November 8, all of a sudden the pattern changed and the number of visits decreased dramatically: 50 to 60% decrease in both visitors and pageviews . For a twice monthly account I refer to the Top Chair Blog Posts category.

I’ve disabled Cloudflare (including their DNS system) on January 1, 2013 and now visits seem to increase again.

Meanwhile on the sister blog Happy Hotelier with a similar setup I have not disabled Cloudflare (yet, but will do soon) and it has no significant increase as of January 2, 2013.

Basically Chair Blog is a Photo blog and apart from a firm fan base of approximately 3,000 people on various social platforms, was getting a lot of traffic from image searches by Google. I have a suspicion that a further Panda refinement that went into works on or about November 5, 2012, left image content served via Cloudflare out…

In both cases the Analytics numbers correspond with the Jetpack stats numbers. For both sites I’ve installed Jetpack in August 2012, because of its statistics and because of its social buttons…

Anybody out there?

Update: Wednesday January 09, 2012

Yesterday after this post I’ve put Happy Hotelier’s Cloudflare on pause. Then I noticed for one or another reason Chair Blog has disappeared from my Cloudflare Dashboard…

I’ve been Twittering a bit about this issue, @Yoast says: “Doesn’t seem possible, but I have no experience with Cloudflare. The discussion with @Cloudflare thusfar:

Twitter Happy hotelier with Cloudflare

Hm…thinking of it..Quite possible that I was fed up so much with Cloudflare (also because recently I had noticed various hiccups with Cloudflare when I was editing posts) that I deleted my Chair Blog account with them…however not entirely sure about that.

After all I revisited the Cloudflare dashboard and had a look at Happy Hoteliers Cloudflare Analytics.

Which gives this picture:
Analytics - CloudFlare

Which we then have to compare with the site analytics looking like this:
Audience Overview - Google Analytics 2013-01-09 18-50-49

Hm when comparing Haagsche Suites with Chair Blog I now notice the dramatic decrease of Happy Hotelier didn’t occur exactly in the same time frame as the decrease in traffic of Chair Blog…there was an earlier decrease in Happy Hotelier’s traffic at the beginning of September. Also it is possible I had Cloudflare deactivated a couple of weeks for Happy Hotelier….

A good Cloudfare: review

Addition On Cloudflare’s blog there was some doubt initially.

Last edited on March 29, 2013 at 12:07 am

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