What is Cloudflare? What you should know about it

Anyone working in technology today has likely heard of “Cloudflare,” especially specialists in webmaster. The most important thing Cloudflare offers is faster website access for your visitors. Even so, many people are still unfamiliar with it. So what is Cloudflare? Read on to find out.

What is Cloudflare?

Cloudflare is an intermediary DNS service whose protective layer manages traffic between your server and clients. Put simply, you use Cloudflare’s name servers instead of reaching your website directly through your own DNS (Domain Name Server). All traffic passes through Cloudflare’s servers before it can reach your website data.

With powerful features that ordinary DNS providers don’t offer, Cloudflare is a favorite among webmasters. Beyond the basic functions, Cloudflare also offers CDN, SPDY, spam protection, a firewall against DDOS, Forward Domain, SSL certificates,…

Cloudflare is currently completely free, which makes it popular for many different purposes, especially its features for speeding up and securing your website.

Pros and cons of using Cloudflare

Advantages

• Cloudflare speeds up your website by caching a copy of it on its CDN servers and serving each visitor from the server closest to them. Static files such as images and CSS,… are also gzip-compressed by Cloudflare, so pages download faster.
• Because fewer requests go directly to your server, Cloudflare saves server bandwidth. Bandwidth use drops sharply, to about one half to one third of what it was before.
• It strengthens your website’s security and limits DDoS attacks, blog comment spam and several other types of attack. You can also improve website security with Cloudflare, for example by using free SSL to add HTTPS to your website. You can restrict access from certain countries, block specific IPs and protect login pages.

Disadvantages

• If your website is on hosting with servers in Vietnam and most of your visitors are in Vietnam, using Cloudflare can slow page loading because of the quality of international connections in Vietnam. The main reason is that requests now travel from Vietnam to Cloudflare’s DNS servers before the result comes back.
• Your uptime depends on Cloudflare’s uptime. If Cloudflare’s servers go down, access to your website can be disrupted, because your domain can’t be resolved.
• Sometimes your hosting firewall mistakes Cloudflare’s IP addresses for attackers.

Should you use Cloudflare?

You can use it like an ordinary DNS service by turning off the domain’s cloud (proxy) setting. Some reasons you should use Cloudflare include:

• Speed: If your server is close to your users, Cloudflare may slow your site down for them. But if your server is far away, Cloudflare will clearly speed up page loading. So if you serve users abroad, you should definitely use this DNS service.
• Auto Minify: It removes unnecessary characters from your source code without changing what it does, for example comments and whitespace, to reduce the amount of data transferred and speed up page loading.
• Rocket Loader: It delays loading all JavaScript so your content displays first. In some cases, though, this can break your JavaScript if you use the command jQuery. So if you don’t need it, you can turn this feature off.
• Security: This is considered one of the most important factors in keeping your website safe from the many attackers out there. Cloudflare can quickly detect and block hackers who try to attack or break into your website.

How to set up Cloudflare

A basic Cloudflare setup is fairly simple and takes 4 steps:

Create a Cloudflare account

Go to Cloudflare’s home page at https://www.cloudflare.com/ and sign up for an account.

Log in to Cloudflare

After signing up, log in to Cloudflare with the email and password you just registered.

Add your website to Cloudflare

Enter the website you want to use Cloudflare’s free DNS service for, click “Add site,” and wait about 60 seconds.

Next, choose a plan. Here, choose the free plan.

Then wait for Cloudflare to scan the DNS records already on domains your domain. If you have already created DNS records, Cloudflare shows them below. If not, you need to create new DNS records to point your domain.

Point your nameservers to Cloudflare

The configuration differs depending on your domain provider, but the basic idea is to replace the old nameservers at your provider with Cloudflare’s new ones.

When this step is done, wait for Cloudflare to confirm that your nameservers now point to it. This usually takes about 1 to 2 hours, not the full 24 hours the notice says.

How to install and use the Cloudflare plugin

Install the Cloudflare plugin

Install the Cloudflare plugin before setting up SSL, to make managing your website easier. It will also help with SSL configuration later. Follow the steps below to install it:

Before you enable SSL, install the Cloudflare plugin to make managing your website easier. It also helps with SSL configuration later. To install it, follow these steps:

• First, click Plugins and choose Add New.
• Next, use Search to find the plugin and wait for the list of plugins to appear.
• Then click Install on the Cloudflare plugin to start installing it.
• When the installation finishes, click Activate.

How to use the Cloudflare plugin

• To start, go to Settings and then choose Cloudflare.
• Next, click API, log in to the website and find My Profile -> API Key.
• On the Global API Key line, you’ll see View API Key. Click it.
• When the popup appears, click Copy API Key for your website. Then go back to your website and log in with this API key.
• Finally, under Optimize Cloudflare For WordPress, click Apply to enable the default settings. Then choose Purge Cache -> Purge Everything to clear the initial cache. Click Automatic Cache Management so the cache clears itself whenever your website changes.

Installing SSL to use HTTPS

If you want your website to use HTTPS, you need to enable SSL on this intermediary DNS service

Types of Cloudflare SSL

There are 3 types of SSL certificates for users, matching different levels of use and security. All three encrypt visitor traffic, which adds value to your website and gets better ratings from Google. The Cloudflare SSL certificate types are:

• Flexible SSL: Most websites use this certificate because it is easy to install. It doesn’t require much technical knowledge, so anyone can do it. With this type you don’t have to install anything on your server and can still use HTTPS. However, traffic between your website server and Cloudflare is not encrypted.
• Full SSL: This is the opposite of the type above: you install SSL on your server, so it is a little harder to set up. The traffic is encrypted, so security is higher.
• Full SSL (Strick): The installation is similar to Full SSL, but you need a verified SSL certificate rather than a free self-generated one.

Our advice: if you aren’t comfortable with servers, use Flexible SSL to keep things simple and easy.

Enable Flexible SSL

To enable it, go to Crypto and, under SSL, click to enable Flexible. Then allow up to 24 hours for Cloudflare to install and activate Flexible SSL.

If the Status shows Active Certificate, it worked. You can now reach your site over HTTPS by typing the address directly. Because it won’t switch from HTTP to HTTPS automatically, remember to turn on automatic redirection

Turn on automatic HTTPS redirection

Scroll down a little, below Crypto, to find Always Use HTTPS and set it to On. After this step, all HTTP requests to your website are redirected to HTTPS automatically.

You also need one more step to fix cases where some CSS, JS or images still load over HTTP. Scroll down to Automatic HTTPS Rewrites and turn it On, and you’re done.

In some cases, though, you will also need the SSL Insecure Content Fixer plugin to fix the errors above.

After reading this article, you should have a clear idea of what Cloudflare is. Depending on your situation, you can use it to speed up your website for visitors. All traffic to your website will also be switched to HTTPS automatically.