This video tutorial discusses how to set up your domain with the CDN (Content Delivery Network) Cloudflare. It is a fairly straightforward process, but may seem a little daunting if you are not familiar with websites and DNS.
Follow along the video with your own website, starting from creating an account with Cloudflare, logging into your GoDaddy domain registrar, and changing the nameservers to move your DNS to Cloudflare.
There are many benefits to using even the free version of Cloudflare, many of which we discuss in the video, including:
- Increased Security – Using Cloudflare for your website can help to protect you from things like DDoS attacks and SQL Injections that can infect or take down your website.
- Faster Load Times – By utilizing Cloudflare’s Content Delivery Network with servers around the world, your content will be served up fast no matter where the user is located.
- Use Less Bandwidth – When static content loads from Cloudflare’s cache, it can drastically reduce the strain on your server and database, which will lower your bandwidth and help with performance.
- Free SSL Certificate – Cloudflare provides you with a free SSL certificate (End and Origin) which is usually at a cost from your hosting company.
- Minification Tools – Minify your Javascript, CSS, and HTML and further improve your website’s speed and load time.
- Mask Your IP Address – Route your DNS through Cloudflare IP addresses to help to avoid attacks by using Cloudflare’s proxied IP address to help protect your origin IP.
- Firewalls – Create firewall rules to help manage requests and further protect you.
- Improved Caching Capabilities – Cloudflare’s CDN stores a copy of files so they can be more easily and quickly accessed. Instead of accessing much of the information from your origin server, the user can be served the request from the CDN server, which will minimize the time it takes to deliver the request.
- Brotli Compression – A lossless compression algorithm to compress data streams. Further increases your website performance.
- Rocket Loader – Prioritizes delivery of content by deferring your Javascript until after page begins to load. This will improve your Time to First Paint and other Page Load metrics.
- It’s Free – Hey, who doesn’t like free? Cloudflare has a free option that is perfect for most small to medium sized businesses.
If your website isn’t currently using a CDN, you are missing out on a lot of great capabilities that can improve the speed, performance and security of your website, and if your website is too slow, you may even be getting a penalty on your search rankings.
The video tutorial above should answer a lot of the questions that you have about setting up Cloudflare for the first time to work with your GoDaddy domain, but if you have any further questions, feel free to contact us to set up a no pressure website consultation for your business.
All of our web designs offer Cloudflare setup included and all the accounts will be in your name, owned and controlled by you.