Every day, we get many messages from website owners and admins asking us what Cloudflare actually is. Its benefits and why we use Cloudflare for WordPress. We’ve deployed Cloudflare on thousands of websites as part of our WordPress speed optimization service. And we continue to recommend it.
If you’ve ever used any of our services, then you remember the part of the onboarding form where you were asked if you want to get Cloudflare and if you’d like for us to set it up for you. Many people ask us why we do that and what is the benefit of Cloudflare. Others mostly click on the “no” option without knowing how helpful Cloudflare can be. That’s why, in this article, we’re going to get more into the matter and provide you with more facts about Cloudflare’s services.
What Is Cloudflare
Cloudflare offers many features and services that can improve the security of your website. But also increase its speed and boost its overall performance. The most notable aspects of Cloudflare include its:
- CDN service;
- Fire walling;
- Website acceleration service.
Cloudflare also offers a free plan, which is especially useful for running a small to medium-sized site. Paid plans also come at great prices, preferable for medium to large-sized sites. The difference they bring to your site speed is huge, so they are definitely worth paying for.
Cloudflare Benefits
Cloudflare can significantly improve your site’s speed, security, and overall performance. In the following paragraphs, we will have a more detailed look at how Cloudflare boosts each of these segments.
It Has The Fastest DNS Host Worldwide
Domain Name System (DNS) hosting plays an essential part in a website’s speed. DNS is responsible for translating a site’s domain name to an IP address. So you can tell that it serves as the internet’s phone book.
When you type a domain name in your browser’s URL bar. The first thing that happens is that the browser “goes and talks” to the hosting provider. It does a DNS lookup, which translates that domain name into an IP address to find the server that hosts that website on the internet. This implies that the faster your DNS hosting is, the faster the search process.
The speed difference between using fast and slow DNS hosting is massive. Many people use the DNS host that came with their domain name or their web hosting when they purchased it. In case your DNS host is bad and slow, a lookup can last between 0.5 and 1 second, or even longer. While with a fast DNS host, such as Cloudflare, it takes only 10-20 milliseconds. That makes a huge difference in speed, which is one of the reasons why you should consider going for Cloudflare DNS hosting.
As you can see, we strongly recommend Cloudflare because it dramatically improves website performance.
Low TTL
Besides being the world’s fastest DNS host, Cloudflare has other qualities, such as meager time to live (TTL). TTL is a value that tells the network router if the data packet has been in the network for too long and should be deleted. This process prevents error packets from circulating the internet forever. So they don’t get stuck and cause the network to slow down. Cloudflare’s TTL is usually around 3-5 minutes. With other DNS hosts, it can be around 5-6 hours or even a whole day. So the difference in the quality of service is obvious here.
Sometimes, however, you can’t use Cloudflare because of technical reasons. If that’s the case, you should still look for DNS hosting as an important speed optimization work. As an alternative option, we typically suggest DigitalOcean DNS hosting, which also provides good quality and is typically among the five fastest hosts globally.
It’s a CDN Service
Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) service, a huge plus from a speed optimization perspective. CDN is a group of servers that hosts parts of a website or a complete website. So you have your web hosting and a network of CDN servers around the world that reduce the hosting load while typically being located closer to the visitors. This means that if you were. For example, in Australia, and you wanted to access a site in the US without a CDN service. Your browser would have to travel to the US and download the site from that server. Simply because of geography. The website would be around 1 second slower for you than for someone located in the US.
On the other hand, with a CDN service, your browser would use one of the local CDN servers in Australia and download most of the website from the closest one. And this is what makes a CDN service the most needed site speed optimization. A CDN service reduces the impact of geography on the speed, while also easing a lot of a load of your web hosting.
A CDN service was a must-have in 2021. Cloudflare has its CDN servers in more than 160 locations worldwide. So this is another reason why we recommend using Cloudflare.
It Has a Built-In Firewall Service
Cloudflare is also beneficial when it comes to your website’s security. It comes with a basic firewall service built-in. Their paid plans also include a web application firewall. Allowing users to easily put up some mighty rules that will protect their key web applications from malicious attacks.
Even with the free plan, Cloudflare allows you to implement some firewall rules and do things that will block particular types of traffic or block traffic from accessing certain parts of the website. Showing a captcha page on the WordPress login is also an option. If you want to learn more about Cloudflare’s rules for filtering brute force logins, click here.
Final Words
This concludes our post on why we use Cloudflare. Hopefully, we helped you discover everything you wanted to know about Cloudflare’s services. If you still have any questions about the topic, or you would like to go deeper in detail, post in the comments, and we will be happy to answer.
