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Cloudflare – Benefits and Uses

Cloudflare – Benefits and Uses

Cloudflare is a wonder service that improves the site speed a lot. However many people doesn’t know the main purpose of this service for which it was created, security!

Yes, Cloudflare was created to protect your website, and while trying to do that, it increased the speed of your website too by providing cache and many other features.

Benefits of Cloudflare

Various benefits of Cloudflare include:

  • Peformance
  • Security
  • Free

I will explain these in detail now.

CloudFlare-logo

Performance with Cloudflare

Cloudflare enhances your website performance dramatically. It does so by not only caching your content but by various other methods and techniques too, including:

  • Cloudflare provides caching of your content, to reduce the load on your server, especially for static content like:
    • Images
    • Javascript files
    • CSS files
  • Rocket loader – it loads the javascript in a special way, by not letting it hinder in your overall website loading, enhancing your website speed and also Google PageSpeed score too.
  • Minify – Cloudflare provides an option to minify the content going through it, including:
    • HTML
    • CSS
    • JavaScript
  • Reduces bad requests and hack attempts including brute force attacks to your server, resulting in lesser server load from these and thus an improved server response and website load time, again a factor in Google PageSpeed criteria too

Minification is highly recommended to improve not only website speed by reducing the load of those files and page, but also in enhancing your Google Page Speed score as it’s considered part of its optimization criteria.

Security with Cloudflare

As mentioned above, cloudflare started as a security feature for the websites like sitelock.com. However it proved to be very good in improving the site speed and performance too.

Cloudflare provides security to your site by:

  • Preventing bad visitors, by filtering them through:
    • Bad ip
    • Location
    • Behavior
  • Showing cached version of your site to general visitors
    • Many visitors never reaches your server, thus your server is ultimately secured

Charges for using Cloudflare

Cloudflare has various options, including the free one too.

The free one is usually enough for most websites and shows a marked improvement in their performance. If you’re really happy with cloudflare and want to go further with the services they provide, you can opt for pro package too that costs 20$ per month or the ones above that too.

Configuring cloudflare can be tricky however, especially their pagerules. Page rules are an advanced settings available in cloudflare that need pro knowledge usually. Well honestly, other cache and performance settings need skills and knowledge too, to avoid any issues in your site instead of speeding it up, like rocketloader and other improving speed settings.

Amazon Cloudfront and Cloudflare

Although both amazon cloudfront and cloudflare provide some common services, both ultimately have a different purpose and specialty.

Yes both can be used together, and most of the times using them together is recommended too.

Configuring Cloudflare Service

I can configure cloudflare on your website with best and optimum settings, with or without amazon cloudfront or any other such service too. I can configure it with WordPress, using w3 total cache or any other caching plugin like WP super cache and WP better minify. The service includes configuring it for non-WordPress site too.

Let me know if you have any custom requirement for your website too!

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