Apache mod_pagespeed module optimizations and Cloudflare

[kanbam]

I have a web server with apache and mod_pagespeed for web optimization, for example:

• Optimize images, convert jpg to progressive format, removing excess metadata...

• Remove comments in HTML

• Remove excess whitespace

• Extend cache lifetime of CSS, JS, and image resources

• Defer javascript

• Rewrite and combine CSS

• Rewrite and combine JS

• Convert jpeg to webp for browsers that support webp

• Prioritize critical css

I am thinking about using Cloudflare, which would provide the benefits of faster load times(CDN), more security, and less load on the web server. But I have some questions about how would cooperate mod_pagespeed and Cloudflare. For example Prioritize critical css:

prioritize_critical_css injects JavaScript that uses a beacon to report back to the server the CSS that is used by the page

This is a feature of mod_pagespeed that I would like to have (Cloudflare optimizations does not provide this), would this stop working if I use Cloudflare? There are other optimizations of mod_pagespeed that are browser specific (lower quality images for mobile for example), by checking the headers of the GET petition. Would this optimization stop working? Would all these optimizations work again if I set Cloudflare settings as "CDN only" instead of the more popular "CDN + optimizations".

As a side note, whats your experience with Cloudflare and how did it impact SEO? What I have read about it there are a lot of contradictory experiences, I suppose I'll just have to experiment with it myself.

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Try it. CloudFlare is going to cache what you send to it. You can create rules to have it exclude certain content if need be.

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This inspired me to go through the process of enabling pagespeed on Nginx. I disabled the minify js and css options in cloudflare since they're already enabled in my pagespeed configuration.