Two most important requirements of a good website are – Speed and Security. A fast loading website not only pleases the users but also Google Search. Reducing the page loading time of your site is one of the first steps to boost the SEO. A layer of security to protect your site from spam traffic bots and attacks reduces the load to your server thus increasing the speed and also keeps your site safe.
There are a number of good CDN services that provide these features but most of them are very expensive. If you are earning a good amount of money from your site, you may consider investing in a premium CDN but until that Cloudflare is the best solution that you can have. Cloudflare is one the most popular CDN (Content Delivery Network) services used by websites to boost their performance and security.
Why use Cloudflare and how come it is free?
Cloudflare works like a buffer space between your site and users. It has a number of web servers at strategic locations around the globe and your site is cached on these servers. The users are served the site content directly from the closest Cloudflare servers instead of your web host. Cloudflare not only boosts your site speed and provide security from spam traffic and brute attacks but also gives you free SSL and a lot more other useful features. And all this is FREE. It sounds too good to be true, right? Cloudflare also provides paid services, which give you some extra premium features. These services are used by big enterprises and corporates and that’s how Cloudflare makes money. And the hundreds of thousands of its free users give it free publicity. So, it’s a win-win situation for both Cloudflare and its users.
How to Setup Free Cloudflare for your WordPress Website
Some of the web hosts like Hostgator and Bluehost provide Cloudflare installation right inside their cPanel. You just have to click the Cloudflare button, select the domain and the traffic to your site will be routed through Coudflare. But if your host doesn’t offer Cloudflare installation inside cPanel, you can easily do it manually. In fact I prefer doing it manually as it gives me more control over things. Also if I decide to change my host in future, it won’t affect my Cloudflare setup.
Step 1 – Create a New Account on Cloudflare
First, you need to visit https://www.cloudflare.comand sign up for a new account.
Step 2 – Adding Your Website Domain to Cloudflare
You will have to enter your domain name and click on Begin Scan button. Then, Cloudflare will scan the DNS records of your website.
This can take a few minutes.
Step 3 – Verifying DNS Records
After the scanning is complete, Cloudflare will show you all the DNS records it retrieved from your domain registrar or web host. In most of the cases, you do not to change anything hereas Cloudflare selects the optimum setting by default. But make sure that DNS records of your domain root and its www version have orange clouds in front of them. Orange cloud means that the traffic to those DNS records (or subdomains) will be rerouted through Cloudflare servers. Grey clouds mean that those DNS records will bypass Cloudflare and will connect to your host directly.
Step 4 – Selecting a Cloudflare Plan
After verifying the DNS records of your WordPress website, you will have to chose a Cloudflare membership plan. We will obviously choose the Free plan.
Step 5 – Pointing Domain Nameservers to Coudflare
Now almost everything is setup on Cloudflare end and it’s ready to be connected to your domain. But your domain nameservers are still pointing to your host servers. You need to go to the settings of your domain registrar and change the nameservers to the ones given by Cloudflare.
Step 6 – Wait for the Nameserver Change to Complete
Now you just have to wait for the nameserver change to be completed. They say that it may take upto 24 hours for the DNS to be propagated but in most of the cases it’s completed in less than 1-2 hours. Until then Cloudflare will show your website as pending. But it doesn’t mean your site will be down. Your site will continue to be served from your host. After the new nameservers are propagated your site domain will show as Active.
You are done now! It’s almost a set and forget kind of setup. But if you want to achieve a little more with Cloudflare there are few more things that you may like to know.
The Cloudflare Dashboard
This is the dashboard that you will see after you login to your Cloudflare account. I would let you know some more useful features that are hidden inside these tabbed icons.
Overview
There are two major functions hidden in the Overview section. When you click the ‘Advanced’ button – Pause and Delete. Use the Delete button when you want to simply remove Cloudflare from your site (in fact your site from Cloudflare). If you do so, remember to point your nameservers back to your host.
Pause button can be used to temporarily bypass Cloudflare servers and route the traffic directly to your host server. It is useful in cased when you are changing some settings in Cloudflare or messed up with some setting and working to rectify it.
Analytics
Analytics tab shows you stats of your site visiters, page views, threats, saved bandwidth etc.
DNS
Here you can see all the DNS records. In case you want to use Cloudflare on a subdomain of your site, this is here you will need to make some changes.
Crypto
One of the most useful and popular features of Cloudflare is Free SSL. SSL gives you that Green lock and Https:// in the URL tab when your site is loaded. SSL not only gives a sense of security to your site users but also boosts your SEO as Google has clearly said it will favour sites with SSL. By default this feature is off. I will show how to setup Free Cloudflare SSL on your WordPress site in a separate post. Until then leave everything as default.
Firewall
In this tab you can change the security settings of Cloudflare. By default the security level is Medium which is optimum for most sites. If change it to high it may show irritating captcha (ever saw those ‘select image pieces with trees or cars or store fronts to prove you are not a robot’ on sites?) to even some genuine users.
Recommended settings:
Rate Limiting– I haven’t enabled it.
Security Level– Medium
Challenge Passage– Leave as default
Access Rules– You block an IP (or even all IPs from a country) from accessing your site or you can whitelist an IP (like your home or office IP) so that it doesn’t go through the security firewall.
Speed
Here you can make some changes to boost the speed and performance of your website by minifying different code elements of your site. make sure that Auto Minify is turned on for Javascript, CSS and HTML here.
Recommended settings:
Enable Accelerated Mobile Links– I have kept it OFF as it’s still in Beta and I am not sure about it.
Rocket Loader™ – Automatic (Turn it off if you use Adsense on your site as it may interfere with it)
Mobile Redirect – I have it OFF
Caching
It manages the Cloudflare cache settings for your WordPress site. Use Purge all after you make any major change to your site (like changing a theme or layout) to removed all cached pages from Cloudflare.
Recommended settings:
Caching Level– Standard
Browser Cache Expiration– 4 Hours
Always Online™– On
(This is a really useful feature. Even if your site is down for some time for any reason Cloudflare will show a cached version of the site to the users)
Development Mode– Off
Page Rules
Here you can set page rules for specific URLs of your site. These are useful when you have set up SSL and you want to show all or some of your pages as HTTPS. For example, you may want to show HTTPS on your ecommerce store page or checkout page but not on blog pages. Cloudflare gives you 3 page rules for free which is good enough for a typical blogger. I will show you how to create the page rules in Cloudflare Free SSL setup tutorial.
Network
Leave all settings as default unless you know what you are doing.
Traffic
Nothing to do here for free users.
Congratulations! You have setup Cloudflare on your WordPress site.
** Cloudflare also offers a free WordPress plugin but if you have setup everything as described above, you don’t need it. I am in the favour of keeping the number of WordPress plugins on your site to minimum anyway.
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