In the battle for speed, every millisecond counts online. In today’s post, I want to walk you through one of the best things you can do for your website’s speed and security. It’s called, Cloudflare – it’s 100% free, and 100% helpful to improving your website’s performance.
Interested? Thought so. Let’s go!
The problem of the World-Wide Web
The internet is a beautiful thing, bringing the world’s information to your fingertips.
When you first get set up with your hosting provider, you get your own little hard drive in the sky. A computer that lives somewhere in a data-center, that will spread your website, your message, and your inspiration to the world.
While this all seems magical at first, there is a slight wrinkle in the ointment.
The Ping Problem – It’s a big world out there
And attention spans are getting shorter. This introduces the problem of ping.
Ping is the time it takes for your visitor’s computer to find and connect to your website. The farther away your visitor is from your web host’s physical location, the longer it can take to connect.
Makes sense, right?
So if your data center is in Chicago, but your visitor is coming from Thailand, it will take much longer for them to find your website than if your web host was also in Thailand.
This can add several seconds onto the load speed of a website, and can impact people actually sticking around to seeing your awesome content.
While it may seem like a problem without a solution – CDN’s come in to save the day!
What is a CDN?
A CDN is not some oil that makes all your troubles go away… but I guess you could say it is the internet equivalent of it! CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, and it does exactly what it sounds like.
Your CDN will create a network of computers that all work together to optimize the delivery of your website.
In other words, it will take the content from your main web host, and duplicate it all around the world.
So now, when someone from Thailand visits your site, your CDN will smartly look for the best server to serve your site from, and it will speedily serve it right up!
Awesome and simple visual of the speed benefit of CDNs
What are the benefits of a CDN?
While speed is a major benefit, it is definitely not the only reason to plug into one. CDNs also help you use less bandwidth (saving you hosting money), increase your security, and enhance other apps in your WordPress site. Let’s take a quick look:
Reducing site bandwith through CDNs
Most web hosts charge you more as your traffic and bandwidth increase. Using CDNs, you can offload a lot of that bandwidth to the network of computers that are storing your site. This reduces the burden on your own host and allows you to stay on my entry-level plans for longer.
This benefit multiplies if you have client sites that you manage, as you are able to keep all the bandwidth on your host low.
How a CDN secures your website
When you first start out, security probably isn’t your first concern. But as your site grows, it becomes increasingly important to ensure your site is protected from any malware and malicious bot.
Luckily, CDNs come to the rescue here as well.
Because CDNs like Cloudflare serve such a large percentage of websites through their distributed networks, they have learned a thing or two. They have built up a massive (and ever growing) list of malicious domains, IP addresses, and other identifiers that indicate a threat to your website.
So if a bot or hacker tries to get into your site, the CDN can step in as a first line of defense and prevent the bad guy from ever getting to your actual server. Pretty neat!
A CDN can prevent downtime to your site
Most web hosts have solid 99%+ uptime, but nobody’s perfect. But if you have a CDN installed, your visitors will think you are!
That’s because if your site goes down – your CDN will be able to keep the most recent copy in its own memory and serve that to your users.
So while your actual website my have gone down, you have hundreds of duplicates that are humming along just fine!
Why Cloudflare vs the others?
This article is focused on Cloudflare, but there are definitely other players in the space:
- MaxCDN
- Amazon CloudFront
- Akamai Edge
- Fastly
- and many more
Which one should you use? Well if you are first starting out with CDNs (which you probably are since you are reading this), costs matter.
And Cloudflare offers an incredibly valuable service for free. No limits on bandwidth, no limits on the number of sites that can be protected, and it provides all the features you would need when just getting started.
MaxCDN is another popular provider that starts at $21 / month, but I honestly have been happy with my Cloudflare experience and have no need to shop around any more.
Cloudflare also integrates with a ton of other plugins and services. When you install popular caching or optimization plugins, you will likely see Cloudflare’s name somewhere in the settings.
For example, ShortPixel (a popular image optimization plugin) will connect directly into Cloudflare to make sure that the most optimized images are being served to your visitors around the world. Very useful!
What are the problems with CDNs like Cloudflare?
With every additional feature you add to your website, you are going to add a small amount of complexity.
When you add a CDN to the mix, you are essentially going to change where the internet is looking for your content. I have seen small reports of a short-term SEO dip when first enabling a CDN, but I wouldn’t let that really concern you. Online business is a long term game, and increasing the stability and speed of your site is an easy trade-off to make.
The other consideration is on general complexity. If you have a caching plugin like WPRocket or W3 Total Cache, you will now have 2 different places to clear your memory: Your plugin cache and your Cloudflare cache:
There is a useful WordPress plugin that attempts to keep your Cloudflare settings in sync with WordPress that you can also check out if you’d like.
