What is Cloudflare and Why Do We Use It?
Cloudflare acts as a protective shield for your website, making it faster, more secure, and more reliable. Think of it as a security guard and traffic manager for your website that stands between your visitors and potential threats. We implement Cloudflare for all our clients because it provides essential protection and performance benefits that every modern website needs.
Key Benefits of Cloudflare
Cloudflare provides several crucial advantages for your website. It includes a powerful firewall that blocks malicious traffic and hacking attempts before they reach your site. Your website loads faster because Cloudflare maintains copies of your site in data centers worldwide, serving content from locations closest to your visitors. Additionally, if your Hosting server ever goes down, Cloudflare can keep your website partially accessible by serving cached content.
How Cloudflare Works with Your Website
When we set up Cloudflare, we update your Domain’s Nameservers to point to Cloudflare’s system. This means all traffic to your website first goes through Cloudflare’s network, where it’s checked for security threats and optimized for speed. This process is completely transparent to your visitors and typically takes only 24-48 hours to fully activate after implementation. In the meantime though, your website should experience zero downtime.
Security Features You’re Protected Against
Your website is automatically protected against several types of attacks, including DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, which can overwhelm and crash unprotected websites. Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) blocks suspicious traffic patterns and known attackers. It also provides protection against bot attacks and comment spam, which can severely impact your website’s performance and user experience.
Performance Optimizations
Cloudflare automatically optimizes your website’s files to load faster. It compresses images and code files, and uses smart Caching to serve your content more quickly. This means your visitors experience faster page loads, which is crucial for maintaining engagement and improving search engine rankings. These optimizations happen automatically in the background without requiring any action from you.
What to Expect After Implementation
After Cloudflare is activated, you might notice an immediate improvement in your website’s load times. The security features begin working instantly, though it may take 24 hours for all optimizations to take full effect. Our security team will receive email notifications if any significant security threats are detected, but otherwise, Cloudflare works silently in the background, requiring no regular maintenance from you.
Important Notes and Considerations
While Cloudflare is highly beneficial, there are a few things to keep in mind. If you need to make changes to your website’s DNS settings in the future, these will need to be done through the Cloudflare dashboard instead of your Domain registrar or your BHM Hosting account. Also, while rare, some very specific types of website functionality might require special configuration with Cloudflare – if you notice any issues after implementation, please let us know immediately so we can adjust the settings accordingly.