CDN setup with Cloudflare for business websites
I set up Cloudflare's CDN for business websites in Kashmir and around the world, so your pages are served from a location near each visitor and bad traffic is filtered out before it reaches your site. It suits a small business site as well as a big one, and this website runs on Cloudflare Pages itself.
What a CDN is, in plain words
And why it matters even when your business is in one small town.
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a set of servers spread around the world that keep copies of your site's files. Without one, a visitor in Mumbai or Dubai downloads every photo from the one server your site lives on, which may be on another continent. With one, the photos, styles and scripts come from a server much closer to them.
Your customers are rarely all in your town. A hotel sells to people planning from other cities and countries, a college takes students from other states, and an online store may ship anywhere. Every file a page asks for has to make that trip, and a CDN shortens it.
Cloudflare is the CDN I use. It also runs your DNS, so setting it up usually means moving the domain's nameservers to Cloudflare and then choosing which records go through it.
What Cloudflare does for a small site
The parts that make a difference to a business website, without the jargon.
Caching
Copies of your images, CSS and JavaScript are kept at Cloudflare's data centres, so repeat requests don't reach your host at all. Whole pages can be cached too, with care on WordPress.
HTTPS
Cloudflare issues the certificate and renews it on time, so the padlock never lapses because somebody forgot a date.
DDoS protection
Floods of fake traffic meant to knock a site offline are absorbed by Cloudflare's network before they reach your server.
DNS
Fast DNS for your domain, with the website, email and verification records managed in one place.
Hidden email addresses
Email addresses on your pages are disguised from the bots that collect them for spam, while visitors still see and tap them.
Is your site behind Cloudflare yet?
Send me your domain. I'll check where its DNS is managed and tell you what moving it to Cloudflare would involve, with the price first.
What a CDN can't fix
Worth knowing before you expect miracles.
A CDN shortens the trip each file makes. It does nothing about the size of the file. A home page with five photos straight from a camera will still download several megabytes on a phone, just from a closer server. Making the files smaller is speed optimisation, and the two work best together.
It also can't speed up the part of a WordPress page that is built fresh for each visitor, such as a cart, a booking form or a logged-in dashboard, because those must not be cached. What it can do is serve everything around them from nearby, which still makes a clear difference.
And it is not a backup. If the site on your host is broken or deleted, Cloudflare will soon be serving the broken version. Backups belong with maintenance and website security.
Moving a site onto Cloudflare
Done in an order that keeps your website and your email running throughout.
Copy the DNS
I add your domain to Cloudflare and check that every existing record has been copied across, email records included.
Switch nameservers
At your registrar, the nameservers change to Cloudflare's. The site stays online while the change spreads.
Turn on the settings
HTTPS for every visitor, caching for images and files, and on WordPress, rules that leave the admin area and forms alone.
Test from a phone
The site, the contact form and email delivery, checked once everything points through Cloudflare.
Domains and hosting themselves are covered on my hosting and domains page.
Questions about CDNs and Cloudflare
Do I need a CDN for a small website?
If your visitors are spread across India and abroad, it helps them most. Cloudflare also gives you HTTPS, DNS and protection from bad traffic, which every site needs whatever its size. For a site with only local visitors the speed gain is smaller, but the rest still applies.
Will Cloudflare break my WordPress site?
It can if the settings are wrong, for example when it caches pages that should change for each visitor, like a cart or the admin area. Set up with rules that skip those pages, WordPress runs normally behind Cloudflare.
Is Cloudflare a web host?
Cloudflare Pages is hosting for static sites, and it is where this website lives. For a WordPress site, Cloudflare sits in front of your existing host instead: the site still runs there, and Cloudflare handles DNS, HTTPS, caching and filtering.
Does a CDN make my site rank higher?
Not by itself. It can make pages load faster for visitors far from your server, and a faster page keeps more of them reading, but rankings depend on much more than that. SEO covers the rest.
Want Cloudflare set up properly on your site?
Tell me your domain and where the site is hosted now. I'll explain what changes, what stays the same and the price before I touch your DNS.