How Does CloudFlare Help to Boost Website Performance

Two key elements that determine your website’s performance are speed (your site load time) and security. It could be as big as an e-commerce website or as personal as your own blog. A secure website is important for you and your customers, and a quick loading website ensures that your customers stay happy and that your business booms. While there are different ways to secure your site and improve the speed, CloudFlare is a solution that does both and can help your website run at peak performance. In this article, we’ll discuss how.

CloudFlare Defined

CloudFlare is a U.S based company that specialises in Content Delivery Network (CDN) services. It also handles internet security, DDoS migration and distributed Domain Name Server (DNS) services. CloudFlare sits between the client/customer and the CloudFlare user’s hosting provider and acts as a reverse proxy server.

It is one of the world’s largest Content Delivery Network. Businesses, non-profits, bloggers, or any individual with an internet presence all form a part of this network. CloudFlare currently powers almost 10 per cent of all internet requests for a base of 2.8 billion people worldwide. Currently, over 8 million internet properties are on CloudFlare.

How Does CloudFlare Work?

As we’ve mentioned previously, CloudFlare acts as a middle man between the client and a server, by acting as a reverse proxy server to mirror and cache websites. This is a type of proxy server where CloudFlare will retrieve resources for a client from one or more servers. Then CloudFlare returns these resources to the client, without letting them know that the resources were from the server. To the client, it will appear as if they originated from the proxy server.

CloudFlare stores content for delivery on the closest edge server, and as a result optimizes loading times. This also allows it to modify content like images and rich text, for greater performance. This intermediary approach means CloudFlare can offer a layer of filtration for security purposes. By sitting in between the client and the hosting server, it can detect threats, malicious traffic, intercept Distributed denial of services (DDoS), remove bot traffic, limit spam and more.

Let’s look at some benefits of CloudFlare and how it can help your website:

1. Reducing Latency

As a Content Delivery Network, CloudFlare helps millions of websites tackle an essential problem: latency. CloudFlare provides its clients with an edge network. By providing this type of network, CloudFlare creates closer entry points for data, as opposed to the data bouncing around between servers across the globe. Currently, the company has around 175 data centres around the world. CloudFlare caches a version of the customer’s website and any static resources and then delivers it to the client/customer based on their closest geographic location.

The close proximity between a visitor and the website helps reduce latency, bandwidth and page load times. By moving the content closer, CloudFlare powered websites will work faster for their customers.

2. Increased Security — Mitigating DDoS attacks

CloudFlare provides protection from a range of threats — these include cross-site scripting, comment spam, SQL injection, bot crawling and more. CloudFlare’s 175 data centre Anycast network, which has 30 Tbps capacity can protect attacks that are 15 times bigger than the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. How does it do this? Its layered security approach brings together multiple DDoS mitigation capabilities into a single service. This allows good traffic through and blocks disruptions caused by bad traffic. Its Global Anycast network absorbs a highly distributed attack so that customers can continue to stay online. It anticipates attacks based on shared intelligence across millions of websites and proactively blocks those with known bad signatures. It protects web servers from direct attacks by creating a secure tunnel between the origins’ infrastructure and CloudFlare’s data centre. Security features like these (and more) ensure that websites, applications and API’s perform at their peak no matter what time or the day, or what type of threat that might arise.

3. Reducing Server Load

Due to the fact that CloudFlare sits as a proxy server between incoming traffic and websites, it helps to reduce the (often) massive strain on servers significantly. (This also works in terms of security, as DDoS attacks won’t even reach the origin websites). Furthermore, CloudFlare offers the Always Online option, where a cached version of the website is saved and sent to the customer in case the origin server crashes. Features like these can provide relief to an overly burdened server, which is struggling under a heavy load. In the case of server errors, CloudFlare allows developers a bit of breathing room in order to figure and fix any problems.

4. Saves Bandwidth

Many Cloud and web hosting providers charge data transfer fees that form a significant part of the hosting bill. Cloud providers often use their own telecommunication backbone and as a result incur infrastructure costs, which are then passed on to customers as data transfer fees. Fortunately, many cloud hosting providers who help deliver traffic to their users, through CloudFlare, also share a presence (with CloudFlare) in the same global data centres. These data centres then transfer the traffic locally through peering connections, which help minimise your infrastructure costs and transit charges. This is made possible by the Bandwidth Alliance, a group led by CloudFlare that includes major and minor cloud providers like Automattic, Backblaze, Digital Ocean, IBM, Microsoft Azure, Vapor and more.

5. Greater Revenue

Research has proven, time and again, that greater website speed impacts your revenue. Better web performance allows for greater user engagements leading to more conversions. Better website performance also results in greater SEO, which will boost your overall website traffic numbers. Greater traffic means more leads, sales and ad revenue.

It’s simple — according to a study by Google and Bing a 2-second delay in website page rendering led to a 4.3 per cent loss in revenue (per visitor). So, how exactly does CloudFlare boost website performance and add to your revenue:

• CloudFlare Argo, through smart routing, finds the quickest, least congested path in the CloudFlare network.
• The CloudFlare global CDN caches websites across over 165 data centres across the world to supercharge the performance of your website.
• Its DNS services reduce critical milliseconds from requests for a DNS lookup.
• It optimises web content delivery by leveraging local storage, bundling JavaScript files and more.
• It balances traffic across multiple locations and multiple servers and uses health checks to identify servers that are offline.

So, if you’re looking to boost your websites performance or your customer’s website performance, and you’re looking for one solution to handle it all — CloudFlare is your best option. It increases your speed, keeps your site secure, saves on bandwidth and infrastructure costs and more. A lot of web hosting providers and reseller hosting providers are offering CloudFlare CDN and network security as an added benefit to the web hosting packages. This might just be the solution you’ve been waiting for.

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