We talked about how to optimize a WordPress site to make it load faster. Because it’s one of the ranking factors in Google Search engine rankings. Also, users love websites that load fast.
And one of the several ways to make a WordPress site fast is by using Cloudflare.
Though we talked about how it works in our guide about How to optimise WordPress site, here is what you should know if you haven’t read that post.
Since you choose a hosting service to host your WordPress site, you get servers that are located at one place, and whoever types your site URL in their browser, the request is made to the location of the server.
Which then sends your site data (text, images, CSS, js, etc) to the user. Now, if your servers are set up in the United States and your visitors are accessing your site from India, it has to be some good amount of travelling between the server and the user.
Cloudflare is a company that has servers set up in many locations and when you set up your site with CloudFlare, they save static files of your site in different servers and send your site data from servers located nearest to the users, making it less travel time to and pro. End result? A fast loading site.
I have been using CloudFlare from last few months and I’m impressed with the performance of my sites where I am using Cloudflare.
CloudFlare doesn’t only make your WordPress site fast, but it also makes it secure by keeping it safe from malicious attacks on your site. So, this is another reason why you should take the time to configure CloudFlare for your WordPress site.
Lets now talk about How to configure CloudFlare for your WordPress site.
First, you need to go to CloudFlare and create an account. Cloud flare is freemium services, meaning, you can get started for Free, and choose their free plan if want more features. In this guide, we only configure CloudFlare with the free plan.
Now, add your site in Cloudflare to continue the setup. Cloud flare will then grab the DNS settings for your site’s domain.
The information gathered by CloudFlare will appear on the next screen where you can verify it with your current settings by going to your Hosting Control Panel (cPanel in most shared hosting) and check the DNS manager.
After verifying the settings, click on next and Cloudflare will give you the new Nameservers which you need to enter your Site’s domain from the Domain Registrar (mine is Godaddy)
Once you do that, it will take a few minutes for the new settings to take effect and once it happens, your domain name status will show active in Cloudflare.
Once it’s done, the Cloudflare account is successfully configured. You can come back to the CloudFlare control panel to see how it’s doing.
You can check out the Analytics tab to find out how much bandwidth is saved, how many requests are saved. All the signals mean that Cloudflare is working properly.