Why do we use Cloudflare?

1. Improved Website Load Times (on average 17% faster!)

The performance factors really are the number one reason why we use Cloudflare. Cloudflare enables us to serve content closer to where your visitors are located using an edge server, providing an easy way to speed up your site while also reducing the latency.

2. Reduced Server Load

For many sites, bandwidth consumption cost is the primary expense. A heavy traffic load on the server slows down all the websites hosted on the server. Through caching and other optimizations, Cloudflare can help reduce the amount of data an origin server must provide, in turn reducing risk for site owners to have a huge increase in bandwidth usage resulting in possible additional fees or worse, site outages.

3. Increased Content Availability as well as Redundancy

In other words, Cloudflare helps mitigate unexpected traffic surges, enabling your site to scale when needed. Large amounts of traffic (say from a popular facebook post) can cause your site to become sluggish or even go down. Thanks to the distributed nature of CDNs like Cloudflare, the site can handle considerably more traffic.

4. Security plus DDoS Protection

Cloudflare helps improve your site’s security by protecting against DDoS attacks, malicious bots and even data breaches. When you consider that the majority of web traffic is served through Cloudflare, it’s the 1st line of defense against attackers.

What are some BIG Names using Cloudflare too?

chase.com
jpmorgan.com
visa.com
puma.com
lego.com
digitalocean.com
discord.com
coinbase.com
hubspot.com
upwork.com
wpengine.com
bitfinex.com
donaldjtrump.com
whatsmydns.net

5. The Server’s IP address is masked

Nobody (except the owner) can know your domain’s IP because your IP is hiding behind the proxy.

6. SEO

Google has always considered speed a ranking factor in its infamous algorithms. So the faster your website, the more likely it will rank well on Google searches. As Google’s Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts highlighted in 2010 when announcing site speed as an important ranking factor:

“Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

7. Cloudflare runs the largest and fastest DNS network in the world

With 37% market share of managed DNS domains, Cloudflare runs the largest and fastest DNS network in the world

8. Cloudflare’s Network

With 155 data centers across 75 countries, Cloudflare’s Anycast CDN caches static content on edge servers globally, reducing latency by delivering your content as close as geographically possible to your visitors. The Anycast network also absorbs distributed attack traffic by dispersing it geographically.

9. Ease of DNS Management

Managing DNS records with Cloudflare is a breeze. We are able to point domains to our server with minimal effort, while maintaining all of the DNS records previously created on the original server.

10. Helps Block Scripts by Competitors and Other Data Harvesters

For example, we’ve had clients attacked by competitors where the competitor had a script written to constantly scan their website to enable the competitor to constantly track their inventory, and as a side bonus dramatically slowed down our clients website. Cloudflare is capable of thwarting those kinds of scripts . Cloudflare can do even more with some of it’s higher level plans.

11. Scalability

While the basic features and functionality of Cloudflare our very impressive and extremely helpful, there are many upgrades that can be done to fit almost any needs that arise. Additionally, Cloudflare offers a suite of performance optimizations, including HTTP/2, TLS 1.3, file minification, and aggressive GZIP. Some other features: Enhanced security with Web Application Firewall, Cache Analytics, Easy PCI compliance, DDoS Alerts and Lossless image optimization.