I don’t want to give the impression I am anti Cloudflare, because it can it be very useful in the right circumstances, as long as you understand how it works and how to use it to best advantage. Much depends on the kind site and where your visitor traffic mainly ones from.
As an example, if you run a small business website aimed at a local market in the UK with UK hosting it’s pointless having it open faster in Japan at the cost of slower loading in the UK. Nobody was more surprised than me when I ended up removing a bunch of sites from Cloudflare a while back after testing showed they were generally faster without it in the areas that counted. This actually became apparent after changing web host and suddenly seeing the saved bandwidth from Cloudflare plummet.
It needs to be tested and if it doesn’t offer tangible benefits to what you are doing it is better to avoid the potential complication.
I know here in the USA, most of the hosting companies generally only have their servers in a few places, and if you are not located there, it can be quite a distance from host-to-end-user. As I pointed out above, it does come down to quality of your hosting, but geography is also a key factor. I have Cloudflare active in over 100 websites, and in every case, it seems to have made a positive impact on site speed.
If you are lucky enough to have your hosting company “local” to the business website hosted on it, and all they get is “local” web traffic, yes it may be quicker without Cloudflare. But there is ample evidence that using a quality CDN, especially for bigger websites, will speed things up in almost all cases, let alone offer other benefits like better site security.
As for making it “trickier to maintain” - yes it adds one step
When making updates or changes to a website, you need to put Cloudflare into “Development Mode” (clicking one button in the Cloudflare Dashboard) so that it doesn’t show you the cached website as you are making changes.
Then when you are done, (and this is purely optional, as Cloudflare will automatically do this 3 hours after you put it into development mode) clear the Cloudflare cache, and take it out of Development mode.
I am using a LiteSpeed server with Quic and the last time I checked Cloudflare had not yet enabled Quic. You also tend to get cache clashes if you have LiteSpeed cache enabled together with Cloudflare, especially if set to cache all. You end up losing a lot of time flushing everything three times and still wondering why you cannot see the update.
Cloudflare has a data centre in London not far from my own web host’s data centre. If I was building a website where the bulk of visitors were on the west coast of the US I’d opt for Cloudflare, but anywhere in the UK I’ve found it is faster direct from my web host and indeed large parts of Europe. With my previous web host it was faster with Cloudflare.
I’ve also had times with Cloudflare with issues like Rocket Loader preventing animations from loading and nobody sends out a message advising to check your sites because of something they have changed, so it is definitely more complex to manage. Their customer support can be really slow as well and take days if you are on a free plan.
If you want to compare a site with or without Cloudflare you will have to add it there first and then try with it enabled or disabled.
There is a list here of speed testing sites but I wouldn’t get overly obsessed about this if your website is not there to make you money. You can spend a lot of time trying to reduce the load time by a 1/10th of a second. Blocs sites are generally pretty fast.
Some speed testers also give misleading results. For example Pingdom chastises me for not using Zip but not recognise I am using Brotli that is faster. The waterfall results can be useful for spotting bottlenecks and then working to resolve them. Wherever possible I avoid call outs to external services like Vimeo that can significantly slow down a website while they mess about fetching analytics from the other side of the world.