What Is Cloudflare and How Can It Help Your Website?

Discover just how Cloudflare can help your website (and your business) even if you don’t pay for their services.

When you’re running a website, you have several responsibilities. First you have to make it secure, which is imperative if you’re asking your users to give out sensitive data like their credit card information. Then you also want to make sure that your website is always available, because downtime really makes your site seem unreliable. And of course, you have to make sure your web page load time is fast because today is an era of quick gratification, and if your web page takes too long to load then your visitors are just going to give up and go to another website altogether. Mobile users are notorious for hating slow load times.

But you can solve all these problems with Cloudflare.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is a CDN (content distribution network) service that you can incorporate into your website as a plugin. Normally, your website interacts with visitors directly, and it can be slow. In addition, hackers can attack your website while bots and crawlers can go through your site and slow things down even further.

When you’re part of the Cloudflare community, Cloudflare acts as a waypoint between you and your website visitors. Cloudflare enables your visitors to access your website at all times, and they can enjoy faster load times with the Cloudflare technology. At the same time, Cloudflare also acts as a security layer that weeds out the crawlers, bots, and hackers from interacting with your website.

It actually started out as a security service, and it was an accident that they became a CDN. They only found out later that their members were reporting that their web pages were loading 30 to 40 percent faster! Cloudflare is available as a free service, but with paid services you can get a lot more benefits.

Benefits

So what do you get from Cloudflare? One immediate advantage is that it’s free, and yet the features you get with the free version are already quite considerable:

1. Spam elimination. With Cloudflare standing guard and intercepting every interaction, they can eliminate any requests that doesn’t help (or actually hinder) your website. You can block entire IP ranges or even requests from visitors in certain countries/locations.
2. Faster load times. Cloudflare caches your static elements on its servers, so you only transmit new information to the web. So visitors can just download these static elements quickly via the pipes to Cloudflare. The end result is faster loading time, which can really reduce your bounce rate. Web users really dislike waiting for a page to load, and that’s bad for business.
3. Reduced downtimes. Since the static elements are cached in Cloudflare and Cloudflare is always up, that essentially means your website is always up too. So you don’t have to disappoint anyone who wants to visit your site.
4. Easy setup. This is especially true if you’re a WordPress or Drupal user.

Are there any downsides? Not really. The analytics are limited, but you can always use Google analytics. You’re limited to 3 custom page-rules, but this is better than nothing. All in all, you get a lot from Cloudflare even without paying a cent!