cr1st1an

If you run into anything or have thoughts later on, feel free to reach out: inbox [at] cris.mx

Thanks, I appreciate that. I went ahead and updated the readme and the plugin text so the privacy section is clearer about what Cloudflare logs and what the plugin itself does or does not do. I want people to understand exactly what they’re opting into, so this feedback really helped.

Thanks for sharing all this. It is clear you have gone through several versions of solving this problem, and a lot of what you described is exactly what led me to build this plugin.

The “in-between” space you mentioned is what I am trying to make simple: keep WordPress as the origin, avoid all the static-site complexity, and still get CDN-level delivery without touching DNS.

And yes, the instant on/off switch is a big part of the design. A lot of people have been burned by setups where Cloudflare goes down or an account gets flagged and suddenly the whole site is tied to that infrastructure. Being able to disable a plugin in wp-admin and immediately fall back to local files feels like the right safety valve for most WordPress users.

I appreciate you taking the time to think it through. If you try it, I would be interested to hear where it fits (or doesn’t fit) with the approaches you have used before.

You are right that a lot of those clients are on “unlimited” hosting and never think about bandwidth at all. I am still trying to figure out how big the overlap is between “does not want to touch Cloudflare” and “actually cares about image performance.” This thread is helping me sanity check whether that overlap is real or just in my head.

That could work as a separate plugin. This one is intentionally not an offloader. WordPress keeps storage and transformations, I only rewrite the final URL.

Right. The target user is not using Cloudflare nameservers.

Noted. I agree the current wording is not clear enough about what Cloudflare logs. I am going to rewrite that section so it is more explicit.

Do they? I honestly do not know yet. That is what I am trying to learn.

Mine is a tiny nail. Please buy my plugin.

If someone can get Cloudflare caching working without changing nameservers, then yes, this plugin does not offer anything new for that case.

Yup, been there. I was serving more than 45 TB of data a month on one site, and they tried to push me into a $4,000/mo product.

I’ll stick with my $20 subscription, thanks.

Thanks for the detailed perspective. Your setup makes sense for agencies or teams that can manage their own caching, droplets, image formats, and traffic patterns. In that environment a plugin like this is not really needed.

The plugin is aimed at a different group. A lot of WordPress users are not on Cloudflare, do not want to touch DNS, and are not comfortable running their own CDN proxy or tuning image formats. They just want their existing media to load faster without changing their hosting stack.

If you are already keeping everything optimized and have a CDN pattern you like, then you are already covered. This is more for the long tail of smaller sites that will never set up their own caching rules or droplets. It is just a simpler path for them.