There are many benefits of using Cloudflare to add speed and security to your website. Millions of websites use Cloudflare to be protected from online threats, including DDoS, and decrease the loading time for pages. In a nutshell, Cloudflare is a CDN (Content Delivery Network), and also a security company that helps small to medium-sized businesses to secure their website and secure their online assets. We will be going over some of the benefits that Cloudflare offers when implementing it for your website —Benefits of Using Cloudflare. Website hosting
Obtaining a Free SSL
Normally, many people make think of an eCommerce website when hearing about an SSL. However, it is now a requirement to have an SSL certificate for any type of website that collects information from users. To ensure that data is being encrypted from a user’s computer to the server, an SSL will have your website be accessible over HTTPS. Google will also use having an SSL as a ranking signal. When you use Cloudflare, you can get a FREE universal SSL certificate. Now, there might be a reason you would need a custom SSL certificate, if so you can always purchase one from a number of SSL providers.
Optimizing Images
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Having images on your website does make your site look a lot better, but when you have a large number of images, it’s best to get them optimized. This will help with page loading speed. On average, about 60% or more of a website’s page size will consist of images compared to HTML, fonts, stylesheets, scripts, and other elements being loaded. With Cloudflare, there is a feature called Polish that can help optimize these images by making them smaller in size, which helps with faster page loading.
WebP compression is also supported by Polish and can be used when starting with a Pro plan from Cloudflare and the Benefits of Using Cloudflare.
Minify HTML, CSS, and Javascript
Every website out there will use HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The problem though is that when a browser loads a web page, there is a lot of whitespace, comments, newline characters, etc. that it needs to go through. By minifying all of these elements, it will help load the page faster. Minifying will essentially compress HTML, CSS, Javascript. Cloudflare provides minification and you just need to enable it under the “Speed” tab of your account.
Browser Caching
When you visit a website for the first time, you may notice within a second or so that the text will be shown before the images. This is because every time your browser goes to a web page, it will send a request to download data from the server. First, it will download the HTML, but then it notices there are more elements to retrieve, so it downloads more data. This process is better known as bandwidth. However, if your website keeps loading the same files again and again, it’s slow and users get a bad experience which can lead to less conversion rates. With Cloudflare, you can tell the visitor’s browser to cache this data for a certain length of time. This will bring up your page speed score and keep users on your site.
DNS Security
You may have heard about DNS before with websites. DNS is primarily used to translate a domain name such as 702pros.com, into a numeric Internet address like 192.168.0.1. Think of DNS as the “phone book of the Internet”. When you look up the domain name, it’ll find the IP address of the server that the site is on. The same concept is used if you were looking for a pizza place, you would find the address for it to get there. However, when DNS was first put to use, several vulnerabilities were discovered. As a result, a system was created to secure the form of extensions that could be added to existing DNS protocols. This system is known as DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extension). Cloudflare offers this feature, but once activated, be sure to test it.
Benefits of Using Cloudflare: Load Balancing
Imagine trying to view a website, but for some reason during that moment, the site doesn’t correctly load or load at all. There may be a number of reasons why this happens, but to overcome this issue, Cloudflare offers load balancing. With load balancing, your web traffic will be distributed across a series of servers. It will ensure that your website is available even if one server goes down. Aside from creating better availability of your website to users, load balancing also helps in decreasing the page load time. This works by serving the content of your site from the nearest origin server based on the user’s location. With Cloudflare’s load balancer feature, it supports geographic routing, automatic failover, and health checks.
Rate Limiting
Benefits of Using Cloudflare: If you have ever heard of DDoS or also known as a “distributed denial-of-service” attack, it is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of service, a server, or network by flooding its surrounding infrastructure with an overwhelming amount of traffic. Benefits of Using Cloudflare: Another way to think about it is like an unexpected traffic jam. You want to see the site (your destination), but the Benefits of Using Cloudflare and a huge amount of traffic is clogging up the route on getting there. Cloudflare helps with these DDoS attacks, mitigating Brute Force login attempts, and other malicious activity with a feature called Rate Limiting.
Cloud WAF
Benefits of Using Cloudflare: Available with Cloudflare Pro plan only, Cloudflare WAF helps to keep your website secure from vulnerabilities. Cloudflare WAF has more than 145 rules that help to secure your website from almost all types of web application attacks. One of the major benefits of using Cloud WAF is that none of the rulesets they have need to be updated by you. It is all cloud-based and they update their rules automatically—Benefits of Using Cloudflare.
