What is Cloudflare and How Does It Work

Lutfi

Get to know what Cloudflare is and how it works

Rancakmedia.com – For those of you who don't know much about what Cloudflare is, we have created an article below, explaining in depth about CloudFlare, see below.

CloudFlare is something that is useful for improving site performance, speeding up access speed, and improving visitor experience.

When it comes to overall site performance, factors such as site page load, content, and visual appeal come into play. However, even if the content and design meet standards, the performance of our site may still be an issue for visitors. This is where we need something called Cloudflare.

Website speed and security are elements that must be considered in maintaining website. To get both, you can use CloudFlare. Maybe those of you who have just heard the word CloudFlare might be wondering what cloudflare is? what are its functions? and how does it work?.

Don't worry, because in this post we will also explain what CloudFlare is, its functions and how it works so that all doubts and confusion that arise in your mind, especially for those of you who are beginners, will be resolved immediately.

By utilizing CloudFlare, your website is guaranteed to be safer from attacks or actions that could disrupt the performance of your website. Apart from that, CloudFlare also provides a number of important services using the features provided. The facilities that can be achieved when your website uses CloudFlare include DDos attack mitigation, analytics for all requests, and so on.

What is Cloudflare?

By acting as an intermediary between websites and their customers, the network Cloudflare operates as a proxy. In other words, CloudFlare functions as an intermediary for users and the website servers that host their websites. CloudFlare is popular for its ability to speed up website loading times while improving website security.

Website visitors can potentially encounter malicious attacks. Did you know, website visitors themselves are classified into 3 types, namely:

  1. Visitor
    Visitors are genuine visitors (humans) who visit your website.
  2. Robots and Crawlers
    In the form of website programs, robots and crawlers are website visitors who try to read each page and consume a lot of server bandwidth.
  3. attackers
    Attackers are visitors who have the aim of carrying out attacks on the website.

What is the Function of CloudFlare

Many website owners use CloudFlare. By using CloudFlare, the name servers will automatically follow the name servers of the CloudFlare network. This of course will make all activity on the website filtered and can be accessed more quickly. CloudFlare itself has various functions, including the following:

To Monitor Malicious Actions on the Website

CloudFlare's initial job is to monitor malicious activity on websites. In this situation, CloudFlare's job is to receive various access requests which will then be checked to see whether the website visitor is a malicious or innocent visitor.

This can be observed from your IP, the sources you visit, and how often you browse your website. If a visit seems like a danger then CloudFlare will block it. Your site will be safe from malicious attacks if you use CloudFlare. You can also check the information on the CloudFlare dashboard.

Directing Visitors to the Fastest Connection

CloudFlare will send website visitors to the nearest data center. This of course can speed up website loading access faster than without using CloudFlare.

Proxy servers spread across a number of countries provide CloudFlare with the ability to send visitors to the nearest server. The speed of your website will probably increase the more users visit it. This is of course very beneficial for you because your website traffic can continue to increase.

Filter Spam Comments

The third purpose of CloudFlare is to filter spam comments on your website. By using third party personal data, CloudFlare can protect your website by filtering comments on your website.

Offline Browsing

Fourth, it allows users to continue using the website even if the hosting is down. Static things like photos, CSS, JavaScript, and so on are cached by CloudFlare. When using CloudFlare, web pages are already in CloudFlare's cache.

Give a warning to visitors when their computer is infected with a virus

CloudFlare's second role is to notify users if their machine has been infected with a computer virus. CloudFlare will provide warnings and encourage visitors to immediately remove malware that attacks their PC. Visitors will usually be asked to submit a CAPTCHA when visiting your website.

Provide Visitor Reports

Visitor reports are displayed in the sixth CloudFlare feature to show whether visitors are robots from search engines or not as well as potential harm and actual human traffic.

Reduces Usage of Server Resources

CloudFlare's final role is to reduce the use of server resources, such as CPU, on hosting. Server load can also be maintained safely if there is an increase in visits.

How Does CloudFlare Work?

CloudFlare protects and speeds up your website by redirecting all websites to your website's CloudFlare server once it is registered with CloudFlare. Automatically, CloudFlare will make data delivery on the website more optimal so that the website has excellent speed and performance.

In addition to limiting bandwidth-intensive bots and crawlers, CloudFlare will also prevent any threats to a website's source server. As a result, you may expect increased speed and security.

How to Set Up CloudFlare

These are the steps to access CloudFlare settings on your WordPress site:

  1. Create an Account
    The first step is to visit the official CloudFlare website and click sign up. Then fill in all the required information.
  2. Add Domain Name
    Your website domain name should be added as the second stage in the process. After you enter the domain name, click Scan DNS Records so you can continue to the next procedure.
  3. Check DNS Records
    After the scanning procedure is complete in the second stage, you will be asked to provide the domain name's DNS information. You can enable or disable ClouFlare on certain subdomains.
  4. Point the Domain Name to the CloudFlare Nameserver
    In this phase, you have to choose a package. You have the option to choose the free plan before continuing. Your domain name servers will be updated once you get CloudFlare name servers. Then click the continue button.

CloudFlare Plugin Setup and Configuration

Installing and configuring the CloudFlare WordPress plugin is the next step.

What are the Benefits of Using CloudFlare?

Apart from its headquarters in San Francisco, CloudFlare is also present in London, England. Customers may expect services such as site security management, performance optimization, and other technical assistance from the organization.

If you are looking for a good approach to ensure your visitors can surf quickly. It's hard to go wrong with CloudFlare. It uses a worldwide network and automatically optimizes web page delivery to deliver fast page loading times.

CloudFlare's access to static content enables fast loading times regardless of the distance between your web server and your visitors. As a result, this allows your site to load twice as fast.

CloudFlare's DNS, CDN, Optimizer, Security, Analytics, and Application modules make it easy to track your site and improve its search ranking. See what CloudFlare can accomplish for you with these features in the complete introduction.

What CloudFlare Can Do

Cloudflare is appreciated by millions of websites for reducing web page load time and defending against internet attacks such as DDoS. For small companies and large enterprises, Cloudflare's CDN (Content Delivery Network) protects online assets.

The following are some of the benefits that you can take advantage of by adopting Cloudflare. When it comes to building a website, there are many advantages to using cloudflare.

Security

More specifically, CloudFlare uses a cloud-based web application firewall to keep your site safe from malicious attacks such as comment spam and SQL injection. CloudFlare also detects threats and bans bots and abusive crawlers so you don't waste bandwidth and server resources.

DNS

Cloudflare is a worldwide Anycast network that operates its DNS, CloudFlare guarantees that your website can be accessed by anyone in the world. Instant DNS changes are possible with the use of DNS. Plus, DNS is free for you to set up. In this way, you can get free tools.

Enable DNSSEC for extra protection for your domain's DNS data (Domain Name System Security Extensions). DNSSEC helps reduce the possibility of fraudulent requests being processed. DNSSEC can be enabled under the “DNS” menu.

Free SSL

SSL isn't just for eCommerce websites, or if your site contains important transaction information, it's for everyone. Making your site accessible via HTTPS ensures data is secured from the user's PC to your server.

Additionally, Google now uses SSL as an indication of ranking. Cloudflare provides free SSL certificates worldwide, but you can always purchase and upload certificates from Thawte, Symantec, Rapid, GeoTrust, or Comodo if you want.

Cloud WAF

WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps keep your site safe from the top 10 vulnerabilities of OWASP, CMS (WordPress, Joomla, etc.). (WordPress, Joomla, etc.). Cloudflare WAF contains more than 145 rules to prevent almost all types of web application threats.

A common assumption is that increasing security can slow down a website, but that's not true. A focus on speed and scalability guides the design of Cloudflare WAF. This only results in a 0,1 millisecond increase in latency. Since cloud-based security providers handle rule updates for emerging vulnerabilities, using Cloud WAF eliminates this complexity. Cloudflare WAF can only be accessed from the PRO plan.

CDN

Taking advantage of the latest hardware advances, CloudFlare is building a CDN that will stand the test of time for the next 15 years. Making a CDN easier to build, cheaper, and more effective than the legacy CDNs you've used in the past is beneficial. As a result, you'll have a unique ownership experience by trying it out.

Optimizer

One technique for getting fast page loading times is to optimize regularly. CloudFlare is an Optimizer used to improve your website by reducing network connections. As a result, your network status may be better understood.

Polish also supports WebP compression and can be accessed starting from the PRO plan. Or, you can go here to learn how to compress photos for WordPress, Joomla, or other platform websites. Spaces, comments, newlines, and other delimiters that are not necessary to serve the website can be removed.

By removing these unneeded characters, the file size is reduced. Because it helps the website load faster.

Cloudflare supports three minification file types.

  1. JavaScript
  2. CSS
  3. HTML

Analysis

Many webmasters believe that stopping attacks is a huge difficulty because none of them can watch their sites all the time. With CloudFlare Analytics, you can forward tasks there. Not only can it keep an eye out for potential dangers, but it can also track web crawlers. Additionally, running visitor statistics is a valuable tool.

Application

Some useful applications are difficult to get download links for many webmasters. Additionally, the download and installation process usually takes a long time. However, if you use the CloudFlare Application, everything will be easier. Regardless of the CMS you use to develop your site or the web server you use to host it, you can simply install it to improve your site.

Browser Caching

Instruct visitors' browsers to cache static resources for longer durations, so that repeated requests are fetched from the local cache to speed up web page loading.

Use Cloudflare's “Caching” tab instead of third-party plugins or .htaccess code to use browser caching.

Web Sockets

Are you using a WebSocket application? Cloudflare delivers WebSockets traffic to your origin servers without the requirement for manual setup. It supports SSL too.

Load Balancer

Cloudflare has just released a cloud load balancer to split your site traffic across different servers. Load balancing ensures the website is always online when one of the backend servers is down.

Load balancers not only help in increasing availability but also reduce page load time by providing content from nearby origin servers depending on the user's location. Cloudflare load balancer offers automatic failover, geo-routing, health checks.

Optimized Network Routing

Argo, a new Cloudflare service for routing site replies through Cloudflare's optimized network to deliver information faster and more securely. By reducing latency, Argo hopes to provide the best experience for its users. Argo is an additional service that is priced based on usage. It can be triggered depending on any strategy.

According to the explanation above, CloudFlare is useful for you to manage and empower your website. If you want to strengthen your website's security, improve its performance, and get additional technical support with minimum work, the features with CloudFlare are essential.

You now have a better understanding of CloudFlare thanks to the information presented above. If you have a website and want your website to have excellent speed and security, you can try using CloudFlare.

By studying the CloudFlare functionality that we have mentioned above, of course you already have an idea of ​​how many benefits you will get if you use the CloudFlare service.

If you're curious about what CloudFlare does or how it works, this article will clear up any confusion you may have. It is possible to improve the performance and security of your website using CloudFlare.

FAQ

Below we have summarized some frequently asked questions about Cloudflare, as follows:

Is Cloudflare Safe?

By using this service, your website is guaranteed to be safe from various attacks and activities that can damage your website's performance.

Conclusion

CloudFlare is something that is useful for improving site performance, speeding up access speed, and improving visitor experience.

That's the information about what Cloudflare is, hopefully the article above can be useful and helpful for all of you.

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Lutfi

Hi, let me introduce myself, Lutfi Hulasoh, I am a writer and techno blogger. I started creating a personal blog writing informative articles about the latest trends and developments in technology. My writing covers a wide range of topics, from mobile applications to artificial intelligence, and I can also provide easy-to-understand explanations to help readers understand complex concepts.