Beginner-ish: How to go about combining optimizing plugins, CDNs, etc?

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I have an incipient WP blog. I have been looking into optimizations for Google fonts, lazy loading, minimizing, etc. The blog currently loads OK, but there’s not so much of it anyway.

I tried using Cloudflare CDN. After some weeks I realized that, with it disabled, my webpagetest.org scores got better in all locations I tried, so I left it disabled.

Yesterday I tried [QUIC.cloud](https://QUIC.cloud) CDN, since my host (StablePoint) advertises that they use LiteSpeed server. It went badly so I also removed it. ^(1)

So at this point I’ve been trying things a bit ad-hoc, and I can deal with them one by one, but not sure how to combine them. E.g., how to know whether prioritizing font downloading + using LiteSpeed cache minimization is causing the slow down in Cloudflare? I can’t just set up and measure; it’s a combinatorial explosion of possibilities so I could spend my life testing stuff.

**So my question is: is there any better way to optimize the whole thing than doing educated guesses and testing them? Am I missing any saner approach?**

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^(1) In case anyone is interested… It slightly improved my scores, but also caused SSL failures and weird CSS problems in some locations. After some hours I wrote to their support, who said that now it was fixed (?) but that I should fix my source server, which was returning “502 bad gateway”. I suspect it was them fatfingering something on their side, because once I reverted to my normal DNS config to remove their CDN the source server seemed unfazed. I asked their service again, who never answered. So sounds like I’m better without them.

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