What is Cloudflare
and why does your website
need it?
A well-optimized website is crucial for success in today’s digital landscape, and Cloudflare can provide the performance, security, and reliability needed to ensure your website stands out and delivers a positive user experience.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a leading company in a service called content delivery network (CDN). CDN works throughout many servers spread across the planet, routing the traffic of website visitors to the server closest to them. This reduces latency, improves loading times, and enhances user experience. Beyond CDN, Cloudflare offers a suite of security features, including DDoS protection, SSL/TLS certificates, and bot mitigation.
How can your website benefit from it?
Enhanced Performance and reliability:
Cloudflare’s infrastructure is a vast network of servers around the globe. The CDN reduces the distance and network hops, significantly reduces the bandwidth costs, resulting in significantly faster website load times, which improves the user experience. Higher user satisfaction and engagement makes it more likely for the user to come back to your website or even share it with their social circle. Not to mention that a fast website represents the quality of it and how much you care and invest in it. Your website represents how you treat your business. Remember last time you accessed a slow website and thought “ow this is such a good website”? Exactly. No one thinks that. Search engines (like Google) also think like this, the faster the website is, the better it can rank in search results, which can increase the organic traffic and lower advertising costs.
Robust Security:
Cloudflare shields your website from multiple threats, the main ones being malicious Bots and Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) – this attack is performed by sending too many access requests to the server, more than it can handle, resulting in the website being offline.
How Cloudflare protects against it? By using dynamic and shared IPs. As the request for access rise, Cloudflare allocates dynamically more servers, with different IPs to attend to your website, then mitigating the data stream until the attack is over. And this is very effective, so much that many government websites, banks and international companies use Cloudflare for this exact reason. It also offers free SSL/TLS certificate, which ensures that your website uses HTTPS, therefore encrypting the data transmitted between your website and visitors.
Reliability:
The extra security provided by this system ensures that your website is always online or with a minimal downtime in case of server failures or network outages and is accessible from anywhere in the world. A significant improvement compared to the general hosting companies. Not to mention the fact that you can sleep soundly knowing that your website security is being handled by the current most advanced system available.
Cost-Effectiveness:
Cloudflare is a valuable tool for enhancing your website’s performance, security, and reliability. By leveraging its CDN, security features, and global network, you can provide a superior user experience, protect your website from threats, and improve your online presence.
All of this sounds wonderful right? And it actually is. But then i know what you are thinking “what is the cost of all of this?”. The answer is – depends on your needs. Cloudflare offers a free plan, but depending of how much security you need, and how much traffic your website has, the free plan wont be enough.
Do you really need it?
If your website deal with sensitive data (credit card info, bank info, etc), or receive a lot of attacks, then Cloudflare is a must.
If you want your website to have a global presence, the CDN system will deliver the performance you need.
But if you just want your website to be faster and more secure, then you should consider the investment, after all there is only benefits and the cost of the service is really affordable.
The websites developed by Wolf&Fox Studio are designed for seamless integration with Cloudflare, should the Client wish to use it or if it’s necessary for the project. Setting up Cloudflare on your own can be complex, particularly when it comes to changing your DNS settings, make sure to ask a professional to do that for you. If you need help with this process, feel free to contact us.
