Besides leaking data by on demand CLR checking, you also have a difficult fail open v fail closed decision.
Failing closed means failure of a third party immediately breaks your site. Failing open means a MitM can simply block the CRL check.
OCSP stapling and the 'must staple' header are a lot better for privacy, and OCSP responses have some validity so at least a 5 hour outage of your CA doesn't bring your site down immediately.
It is still vulnerable to a DOS and trust on first use though.
I would like to live in a world where OCSP stapling is widely deployed and we can require OCSP and advise people to set must-staple if possible while everybody who doesn't staple will just have to eat the privacy implications. But this is not (yet and for the foreseeable future) that world.
Apache and nginx both shipped OCSP stapling implementations that are very bad, awful enough that for almost anyone I'd say "No, don't enable that" rather than try to explain how they need to use it and get them to a place where it's useful and safe. Adam Langley wrote years ago about how to do this correctly, and there does seem to be a little bit of movement in the correct direction at Apache, but the situation remains pretty poor.
Failing closed means failure of a third party immediately breaks your site. Failing open means a MitM can simply block the CRL check.
OCSP stapling and the 'must staple' header are a lot better for privacy, and OCSP responses have some validity so at least a 5 hour outage of your CA doesn't bring your site down immediately.
It is still vulnerable to a DOS and trust on first use though.