To understand the interaction between Facebook referral traffic, URL query strings like "fbclid", and Cloudflare's full page caching, it's essential to consider the user experience and site performance implications. The focus here is on why despite achieving high performance scores or displaying rapid fully loaded times in synthetic benchmarks, the real-world experience for most visitors—particularly those coming from Facebook—might be significantly slower due to caching behaviors affected by URL query strings.
When a user clicks on a link to a website from Facebook, a unique "fbclid" parameter is often appended to the URL. This parameter, which stands for Facebook Click Identifier, helps Facebook track the effectiveness of advertising and social interactions. Each "fbclid" value is unique to the individual click, meaning that virtually every visitor from Facebook has a different URL than others, even though they are accessing the same underlying content on your site.
Under normal circumstances, a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare caches pages at the edge servers, which means that when a user requests a page, the CDN can deliver it directly from the nearest server without having to fetch it from the original web server. This reduces the load time significantly and decreases the load on the original server. However, Cloudflare’s default configuration treats URLs with unique query strings as distinct requests. Therefore, each unique "fbclid" generates a new request that isn't served from the cache but fetched from the origin server. As a result, the caching mechanism, which is crucial for delivering high-speed web experiences, is bypassed, leading to slower page load times for users following links from Facebook.
To address this inefficiency, you can configure Cloudflare to ignore certain query parameters, such as "fbclid". By creating a Page Rule that strips this query string from the URL, you can ensure that Cloudflare treats all user requests as if they are accessing the same URL, thereby serving cached content more effectively. For instance, a URL like https://example.com/query-jobs/?fbclid=xx would be cached and served as https://example.com/query-jobs/, irrespective of the "fbclid" value appended to it.
Setting up such a Page Rule involves specifying which URLs or patterns should trigger the rule and defining the actions that Cloudflare should take when such URLs are requested. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to implement this:
- Log into Cloudflare: Access your Cloudflare dashboard by logging in.
- Navigate to Page Rules: Find the Page Rules section. This is where you can define new rules or edit existing ones.
- Create a New Page Rule: Click on "Create Page Rule." Here, you'll specify the pattern that matches the URLs you want to affect.
- Define the URL Pattern: Enter the pattern that your URLs follow. For example,
*example.com/*fbclid=*would match any URL on your domain that includes the "fbclid" query parameter. - Add Settings: Select "Remove Query String" from the list of available actions. This action instructs Cloudflare to ignore the query string when caching the page.
- Deploy the Rule: Save and deploy the rule. From this point on, Cloudflare will treat URLs with different "fbclid" parameters as the same URL for caching purposes.
Implementing this rule does more than just improve loading times; it enhances the overall user experience by ensuring that content delivery is as efficient and streamlined as possible. Additionally, it reduces the load on your origin server, which can be significant, especially during high traffic periods such as marketing campaigns or viral content sharing.
Moreover, this setup contributes to more accurate performance monitoring and assessment. Without the rule, synthetic benchmarks might show excellent results—since they typically don't use URLs with query strings like "fbclid"—while real users experience slower speeds. By implementing the rule, you ensure that the performance metrics more closely align with the actual user experience.
Remove fbclid Query via htaccess
If Cloudflare page rules are deprecated, you can remove the fbclid query parameter from URLs and redirect them with a 301 status code, by using the .htaccess file in Apache web server environments. The following code snippet checks if the fbclid parameter is present in the URL and then redirects to the same URL without it:
RewriteEngine On
# Check if the fbclid parameter is present in the query string
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)fbclid=[^&]+(&|$)
# Remove the fbclid parameter and redirect permanently
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]
Place this code in the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website. Here's what each line does:
RewriteEngine On— Enables the runtime rewriting engine.RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (^|&)fbclid=[^&]+(&|$)— This condition matches URLs where thefbclidparameter is present anywhere in the query string.RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]— This rule redirects to the same path ($1refers to the part of the URL before the query string) and explicitly removes the entire query string by appending a?at the end. TheR=301flag indicates a permanent redirect, andLsignifies that no subsequent rules should be processed if this rule is applied.
Make sure to test this in a development environment before deploying it to production to ensure it works as expected without affecting other functionality on your website.
In summary, while Cloudflare's full-page caching offers significant performance improvements, its effectiveness can be hindered by unique query strings like those introduced by Facebook referrals. By configuring Cloudflare to ignore these parameters, you ensure that all users benefit from the cached content, thereby providing a faster, more consistent browsing experience. This approach not only boosts user satisfaction but also optimizes your resource utilization, making it a critical adjustment for any SEO-conscious website operator or marketer relying on Facebook for traffic generation.