Implementing Cloudflare is no doubt one of the simplest ways to optimize and add security to your website. Cloudflare is a CDN (Content Delivery Network), and Security Company aims to supercharge and secure online infrastructure for small to enterprise level businesses. It serves as a middle layer between your actual hosting provider and the user using the name of your domain, who browses your website.
It caches your website’s static resources, letting your website load faster and puts on less web hosting load. It’s the CDN that’s in the center of your domain name and web host.
One of Cloudflare’s significant benefits is the free CDN. Integration is easy and does not change the image URL or show URLs like cdn.domain.com. Cloudflare is absolutely free to start, while other CDN services cost money.
You do not need to do any code changes, or install any software. Just set up an account and choose which domains you would like to secure. You’ll experience superior performance of the website in as little as five minutes.
As the traffic on the website is filtered only valid traffic flows. Therefore, the hosting resources will be used by the actual customers with better speed. In addition, Cloudflare caches the static content and supports it by requesting it from the host each time. So, to serve the content the host needs less processing.
Google Analytics or any other analytics you will use in HTML are based on the fact that users have JavaScript enabled and the page loads to the point where the tracking code is accessible. With Cloudflare, analytics are much more precise than JavaScript-based stats as they catch all of the traffic stats that JavaScript may lose due to blocked JavaScript content or page not loaded fully.
The entire traffic does not head to host. So, one can save on the bandwidth of spammers and hackers that you would otherwise waste. In addition, the static content delivered as cached from Cloudflare would still be saved on the hosting bandwidth.
If you have multiple images on your website then Cloudflare Polish may dynamically adjust them for quick loading to a smaller size. You can choose either lossless or lossy compress.
Polish supports WebP compression as well and is accessible from the PRO package. Additionally, you should link to this for learning how to compress images for WordPress, Joomla or other website platforms.
DDoS and DoS are blocked by Cloudflare. DDoS is an attack on the website that sends out too many automated requests from various locations to render it down.
If the hacker knows your IP address, Cloudflare can’t fully protect the server from DDoS since the attacker targets IP that explicitly bypasses the Cloudflare. The workaround would be to change the IP address and only use the new IP address in Cloudflare.
If a platform receives too many DDoS attacks, then using Cloudflare makes sense.
Not only is it improving your website hosting experience, but you are accessing a growing international user community. An attack on any user is immediately identified and consequently blocked for the entire community. Cloudflare helps you protect against numerous threats, be it cross-site scripting, spam comment, SQL injection, excessive bot crawling, harvester emails, etc. It will deter most attacks automatically without the complicated configurations needed for other security plugins and tools.