
How to Secure and Optimize Your WordPress Site with Cloudflare

Cloudflare is one of the best content delivery networks (CDN) and security services available in the market. The best thing about Cloudflare is that it is free! When you connect your WordPress website with Cloudflare you can boost the site speed with CDN, secure it with SSL and bot protection, and use some other features as well. Therefore, you must know how to secure and optimize your WordPress site with Cloudflare. This post will help you to understand everything that is there about WordPress and Cloudflare.
How Cloudflare secures and optimizes your WordPress Website?
In case you’re inexperienced with Cloudflare, here’s a quick-fire rundown of the benefits of utilizing Cloudflare for WordPress:
- CDN – Cloudflare’s content delivery network helps increase your site by serving your static content from an immense network of worldwide servers. Cloudflare is the most well-known free CDN service. CDN helps with improving your ping as well.
- SSL – if your site doesn’t as of now, have an SSL certificate, Cloudflare can help you use HTTPS on your WordPress site to get the green padlock in visitors’ browsers.
- DNS – Cloudflare is one of the quickest DNS providers, which can accelerate your site’s ideal time to first byte (TTFB).
- Security rules – Cloudflare allows you to set up custom security rules to get explicit pieces of your site, similar to your WordPress dashboard.
- DDoS assurance – Cloudflare can assist you with securing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. It can likewise help you just by and large channel out malicious traffic.
- Other execution benefits – Cloudflare can assist you with minifying your code, empower Brotli compression, and actualize different execution best practices.
Setting Up Cloudflare for WordPress
If you are setting up Cloudflare for your WordPress site, then there are a few things that you must know beforehand. Cloudflare is a reverse proxy service, meaning for it to be working, it must be able to manage your domain’s nameservers. This is important because Cloudflare can then serve up content cached from its CDN and remove the malicious ones. What you need to do for this to work is change your domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare. Let us see how to do it properly.
- Creating your Cloudflare account
To get things started, go to Cloudflare and sign up for an account. On the page that appears next, enter the domain name of the WordPress website that you wish to use with Cloudflare and press the Add Site button. Then, you will be asked to choose a plan. You can opt for the free plan at present as it has all the necessary features that most WordPress sites require.
- Verifying DNS Networks
After you have chosen your plan, Cloudflare will verify your website’s DNS records. In case you don’t know what’s happening here, don’t stress. The solitary thing you need to check is that you see an orange cloud close to primary domain name (which you should see as a matter of course – no activity required). Next, you need to click on Continue.
- Updating nameservers to point towards Cloudflare
After the above step is done, Cloudflare will offer you a list of nameservers to replace your existing ones. Nameservers are essential for what you use to interface your domain name to your web hosting. At the point when you change to Cloudflare’s nameservers, Cloudflare can guide traffic to your site. It utilizes this capacity to:
- Channel out malicious traffic – it will send standard traffic to your site much the same as should be expected while sifting through negative factors before they can arrive at your site.
- Convey static content from the nearest server in its massive worldwide network (the CDN part).
Whenever you’ve changed your domain’s nameservers, return to the Cloudflare interface and tap the Done, check nameservers button.
- Configuring some basic settings
The next page that will appear on your screen will help you to configure some basic settings for Cloudflare. Suppose you intend to use SSL/HTTPS. It would help if you went for the Full option. It will help you to secure traffic on your site and also get your site the green padlock in your visitors’ browsers. You can likewise configure:
- Minification – It helps to downsize your code. Numerous WordPress plugins assign minification. So, in case you’re as of now utilizing a plugin that does that, you shouldn’t empower this in Cloudflare.
- Brotli – Brotli is a server-level compression option in contrast to GZIP. It is prescribed to keep it enabled.
Whenever you’ve settled on your decisions, click Done.
- Verifying that you have a complete connection
After clicking on done, you may see a popup asking you to complete your nameserver setup. Again – don’t fret. Nameservers can require as long as 48 hours to update, so it’s ordinary to see this message for a some hours regardless of whether you did everything effectively. Stand by 30 minutes to an hour and afterward click the Re-check now button to check whether the nameservers have updated. When they do, you should see a success message.
By following the above steps, you will have successfully learned how to secure and optimize your WordPress site with Cloudflare. As you can see, the process is not that difficult and can be done quickly. So, get started right away.
Amit Bhosle is a blogger and social media expert. I enjoy jotting down ideas and facts, and in the endeavor of doing the same, I come up with various articles on topics related to Social Media and Travel. You can check out my content on Citeroyale.
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