Google visits drop after implementing Cloudflare

[sansanotsansha]

I implemented Cloudflare one week ago. I think I configurated it ok (DNS servers, new SSL certificates with Cloudflare), and the webpages work ok for me. Even I selected the 'Auto Minify' option to cache JavaScript, CSS, and HTML outputs.

However, I'm suffering several issues:
* the Googlebot crawl activity was multiplied by three in the last days
* the time spent downloading a page increased by 50%
* I'm getting wrong 5XX errors in the Google Search Console. Webpages are ok, they are few errors, but I must select the "Validate Fix" option manually for all of them
* the traffic from the Google Organic search decreased 25%

I wondered if any of you could provide me any help with this issue. Thank you very much.

[robzilla]

For uncacheable content, a CDN like Cloudflare adds another roundtrip to requests. What used to be Client -> Server is now Client -> Cloudflare -> Server. This will always be slower. Your static files, if allowed to be cached, will likely be retrieved much faster though.

A 500 error [support.cloudflare.com] usually happens "when an origin server has encountered an unexpected condition and was unable to fulfill [the] request". You can check your server's logs to see if the errors show up there, in which case your server is not properly responding to requests from Cloudflare's servers. And if Googlebot encounters errors, that can certainly (but temporarily) affect your positions in the SERPs.

Cloudflare server can go down while a bot is trying to visit your website

That is very unlikely.

[justa]

Has traffic in general dropped?

I would find it unlikely that cloudflare would do this, but is it possible that your auto Minify on the JavaScript is having an impact on the GA code?

Are you running Moz or ahrefs that can point to a drop in the rankings (which would be the attribution to the reduction of traffic from organic)