Protect your website with Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a popular service that provides website security, performance optimization, and content delivery. It acts as a reverse proxy, sitting between a website and its visitors, helping protect and accelerate the website. This tutorial is a beginner-friendly guide to getting started with Cloudflare:

Sign Up for Cloudflare

• Go to the Cloudflare website. (https://www.cloudflare.com/ )
• Click on “Sign Up” / “Start for free” and create an account using your email address.

 

Add Your Website

• After signing up, you’ll be taken to the Dashboard.
• Click “Add a Site”.
• Enter your website’s domain name (e.g., example.com) and click “Add site”.

Select a Plan

• Cloudflare offers several plans, including a free plan. For beginners, the free plan is sufficient as it includes essential features such as:
  • DDoS protection
  • Global content delivery network (CDN)
  • Basic website analytics
  • DNS management
• Select the Free plan and proceed.

Update DNS Settings

• Cloudflare will scan your existing DNS records and show you a list of the current ones. These are typically provided by your domain hosting provider.
• Ensure that the DNS records (like A, CNAME, and MX) match what your hosting provider uses.
• Enable Cloudflare for relevant records: You’ll see a cloud icon next to each DNS record. Make sure the cloud is orange to route traffic through Cloudflare’s servers. This will activate Cloudflare’s protection and performance features for those records.

Change Your Nameservers

• After configuring your DNS records, Cloudflare will provide you with two nameservers ( For example something like, alice.ns.cloudflare.com and bob.ns.cloudflare.com).
• Go to your domain registrar (where you bought your domain, e.g., GoDaddy, Namecheap, BigRock, etc.), and change the nameservers to the ones Cloudflare gave you.
• This may take some time (up to 24 hours) to propagate across the internet.

Configure Your Settings

Once your site is connected to Cloudflare, you can start exploring the dashboard for additional settings:

• SSL/TLS Encryption: Cloudflare offers free SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates. Go to the SSL/TLS tab to enable HTTPS for secure communication between visitors and your site.
• Caching: Cloudflare caches your site’s content on their servers to speed up loading times for visitors. You can configure caching settings in the Caching section of the dashboard.
• Firewall Rules: You can set up custom security rules to block malicious traffic. Go to the Firewall section to set up basic rules, like blocking specific IPs or countries.

Performance and Speed

Cloudflare provides performance improvements like:

• Automatic image optimization (for example, compressing images on the fly with the Polish feature).
• Rocket Loader: Speeds up the loading of JavaScript-heavy pages by optimizing how scripts are loaded.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN): This caches your site’s content in data centers around the world, so visitors get faster load times based on their location.

Monitor Traffic and Analytics

Cloudflare provides basic analytics about your website traffic, including metrics like:

• Total number of requests
• Cache hit ratio
• Security events (blocked threats)

Check the Analytics tab for real-time data.

Optional Advanced Features

As you get more comfortable with Cloudflare, you can explore advanced features:

• Page Rules: Customize Cloudflare’s behavior for specific URLs (e.g., redirecting visitors, enabling or disabling cache for specific pages).
• Workers: Write serverless code to run on Cloudflare’s edge servers, offering more advanced customizations.
• Load Balancing: For high-traffic sites, you can distribute traffic across multiple servers to ensure high availability.
• Cloudflare Turstile: Alternative to traditional CAPTCHAs.

Now your website is protected by Cloudflare, benefiting from faster loading times, improved security, and better overall performance.

Cloudflare’s free plan provides solid security and speed features for most small to medium-sized websites, and you can always upgrade as your website grows. The setup process is pretty straightforward, but feel free to reach out if you run into any trouble!