[deanhills]

Agreed with this statement. But one can use Cloudflare as their CDN to get their website loaded fast. I would agree that Cloudflare protects website from DDoS attack. But with that, other optimization comes too!
My personal experience would say that the Cloudflare's cache optimization,minifying settings and the best of all, its Railgun. These tools have surely boosted my website's performance.

I've heard very good reports about Cloudflare, provided as you've already indicated, it's set up correctly to maximum advantage.

I think I must have done something wrong when I tried it a few years back, as it slowed down my Website. It could also have been where I was located in the UAE that that could have had a negative impact. The Internet is heavily censored there and they like to see everyone's IP so have all kinds of filters for that.

I should try Cloudflare again and see whether there is a difference.