The cloudflare CDN is there because your theme includes "auto-render.min.js" and "katex.min.js" from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. They are in script tags in your homepage HTML. You can verify this with: > curl -L ahelwer.ca | grep 'auto-render.min.js'
You can check my domain if you want an example of a CNAME record: > dig CNAME www.jeremypoole.ca
I am also using Hugo, I modified a theme called "coder".
As far as avoiding trackers, it would depend on what you mean by tracker. In your case, the external requests are for fonts and a couple of JavaScript dependencies. You could easily host those yourself instead of using the CDN, and then there would be no third-party HTTP requests.
As a fellow .ca HNer, I would gladly help you out. Feel free to hit me up.
On the free tier of Cloudflare a site is deployed to 194 locations. That can knock a couple of hundred ms off of a page load time. It might be worthwhile if you need something to be especially fast.
That said, Cloudflare is much more of a hassle to set up. Netlify is ludicrously easy. That's one of the many things I like about it.
I use Cloudflare in front of Netlify.
Step 2: add the domain on Cloudflare and let it grab the DNS entries Netlify made
My site doesn't load any files from a different domain since I removed the Twitter share button javascript[0], except for one page.
I moved the mailchimp signup to a separate page to isolate their JS code to just that page.
[0] https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-08-30-twitter-share-b...
If we depend on other people's hosting and themes then we just kind of have to accept what they offer.
But getting our own hosting doesn't have to be difficult. There are many cheap providers that give sftp access, for example. Pelican comes with a script for uploading to sftp.
Only if you have a licence for it — font licences are typically prohibitively expensive for individuals' use.
Open source doesn't necessarily mean free to use for whatever you want. Which licence a font on Google Fonts uses varies - common ones are Apache and Open Font Licence, but you should check the licence file in any font pack you download.
Personally, I avoid third-party requests. CDNs are so HTTP1.1.
You may be able to disable this in the theme config if you don't use it.
I guess the whole point of using cloudflare as the cdn is so that people can reuse this from cache.
Whereas dumb people like me hand code a site and keep small chunks of code or 'boot strap' type folders where we can re-use old assets quickly and with the knowledge of exactly what's in them.
I don't use Hugo, etc, but it seems odd to me that it's not abundantly clear how to nix CDN and Google asset references from the site generation code.
All static site generators do is take a bunch of inputs (markdown files, templates, config, images, etc.) and process them to output a directory of HTML and assets. It's usually trivial to do a search on the input side and identify the source of the problem code. Commenting it out and reprocessing results in it being removed.
You only run into complications when there is some odd dependency between the static site generator and the inputs. Generally, it'll delegate everything to the templates it uses (good separation of concerns), but sometimes there is a weird config option, or convention you are supposed to use.
Perhaps I need to look into these things a bit more!