Cloudflare is a leading company that offers services like CDN (content delivery network), DNS, DDoS, and security. The company has grown to become a leading player in the industry and it has been backed by some of the tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm. Because of their impressive services, they have some of the biggest clients in the industry as well. However, it is not just for big tech companies but also anyone with a small business or someone who owns a web page.
If you are looking for a way to upgrade your security and enhance the overall speed of your site, then installing Cloudflare would be a smart choice. Cloudflare comes with some incredible benefits for a reasonable price and it also offers unlimited bandwidth for free.
How does Cloudflare work?
Cloudflare is one of the biggest content delivery methods as well as one of the fastest. The reason for the speed is that it uses multiple servers across the globe to deliver content on websites faster.
Cloudflare makes several copies of the website which then appear on many proxy servers across the globe. When someone searches for your website or content, it will show the website on the nearest server of the viewer, which reduces leading time and expands the reach of your website.
Furthermore, Cloudflare provides security by monitoring all incoming traffic and it also blocks a user if it seems suspicious. This way your website will be protected against distributed denial of services attacks (DDOS).
Is Cloudflare beneficial for your WordPress site?
In short, yes it is!
As we have mentioned before, Cloudflare’s services help your WordPress site to load faster and protect against suspicious activity as well as attacks. This helps you to get more traffic and minimum cyber risk.
Cloudflare also helps with optimization of the images with its features like resizing the images and auto minification. It will enhance the performance of the site by a large margin, so it can be a good move to install Cloudflare on your WordPress site.
How to install Cloudflare Free CDN on your WordPress Site?
Installing a Cloudflare Free CDN is easier than you think, here is a tutorial that will help you install Cloudflare Free CDN on your WordPress site:-
1. Make an Account on Cloudflare
The first thing you would need to do is to make an account on Cloudflare. Head to the Cloudflare website and click on sign up to create a new account. You will need to enter your email address for it to verify.
2. Adding a Domain Name to Cloudflare
Once you have created an account in Cloudflare, you can move forward to add a domain name to Cloudflare:
- First click on the add site (on the top right of the Cloudflare dashboard)
- Now enter the URL of your WordPress site and click on add site
- Now you will be asked to pick a plan.
Since you want to install it for free, continue with the free plan which is suitable for small to medium websites.
If you own a large website with huge traffic, you can look at the different paid plans provided by Cloudflare and continue with that plan.
3. Checking Your Domain’s DNS Records
For the next step, you will have to check or add the domain’s DNS records. Cloudflare will automatically scan some DNS records, however it might miss some so you would be asked to review and add DNS records for your domain.
While you are checking and adding domain records, you should enable Cloudflare for www and non-www versions of your site. To do this, you will have to toggle the button under proxy status. And you have to add a CNAME with www host, after that Cloudflare will automatically redirect www users to non-www version. But in case if you want to use www as well, then you need to add A record with www pointed with the hosting IP or Name Server.
You can click on continue once you are done
4. Pointing Your Domain Name to Cloudflare Nameservers
Now you will be asked to Change your name servers by Cloudflare. Make sure to copy both Cloudflare nameservers before heading to your domain to register.
Changing of name server may differ from one domain name registrar to other.
