What is Cloudflare

Time to Read: 10 Difficulty Level: Beginner
Tools Needed: Cloudflare Package Last Updated: 27/11/2024

What is Cloudflare and what does it do?

In this guide we discuss what Cloudflare is and does and how it can help your site reach it’s potential

What is Cloudflare
How does Cloudflare work?
What can Cloudflare do for my site?
Security
Site Speed
SSL Certificate

What is Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a global content delivery network (CDN) which offers a variety of services to improve security, performance and the reliability
of websites and applications.

Cloudflare’s network provides services for millions of users and their websites all around the world.

How does Cloudflare work?

When going to a website, a user’s request is sent from their computer over the internet to the website’s server. This then returns the response with the web page which was requested. Simple right?

However, if too many requests come at once, servers can become overwhelmed, slow down, become unresponsive and the user doesn’t get a reply for their request.

Cloudflare was created to ease these issues like this and improve the reliability of a client’s website. This is done with a large network, known as an edge network. This provides content closer to the user as it can pull some of the data from Cloudflare’s edge network, rather than the server directly, saving resources on the server and speeding things up as there are less physical hoops to jump through to get to the desired data.

What can Cloudflare do for my site?

Cloudflare has a large number of services which can help your site in many ways. In this guide we will describe some of the features and benefits of using Cloudflare and it’s services.

Security

When proxying behind Cloudflare’s network it can provide additional tool’s to protect the site against unwanted visitors, meaning that your site is getting more legitimate requests and not wasting resources on bot traffic or users who you may not want to access the site.

A few examples would be:

  • Geo blocking - This is either allowing or restricting access to your site, so select countries or contents can visit the site
  • This can be unique rules to lock down an admin area of your site
  • It has the ability to block select bot traffic
  • Protection against DDoS attacks
  • Cloudflare Managed WAF rules adding an additional layer of protection against known attack vectors

Site Speed

With using Cloudflare’s network, your site is often closer to your users requests. This means that if a user is trying to access your site from France, rather than going to the data-center in London to request all the data off the server, it can potentially obtain this from Paris instead.

Within Cloudflare, it’s also possible to enable tools to improve speed further which include image optimization tools, content optimization tools and the ability to manage protocols.

SSL Certificate

When proxying behind Cloudflare, this provides a free SSL Certificate for your domain and it’s subdomains.

Cloudflare’s SSL can provide end-to-end encryption with different SSL options as well as being able to provide custom SSL’s for an additional fee or even upload an externally purchased SSL certificate on the Pro Package.