Why Use Cloudflare with WordPress?

• What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?
• Cloudflare Security Benefits: WAF, DDoS proection, Form/Bot Protection
• How to Create a New, Free Cloudflare Account

What is a Content Delivery Network (CDN)?

A CDN is a network of servers and data centers that are geographically dispersed. Data is cached, or saved, on these servers, and then requests for your website are served back to guests from these saved versions. The servers are geographically and spatially relative to the guest’s location, so the transfer time is also reduced. This effectively speeds up your site by serving rendered versions of your pages from a location much closer to your users than your website may be otherwise. Serving cached objects from a CDN also cuts down on your bandwidth usage, which will save you money depending on how you pay for data through your web host.

You can enhance these settings using Cloudflare’s page rules, which will further reduce load times and speed up your site, a massive benefit when indexing with Google and other search engines.

Cloudflare Security Benefits

In addition to the benefits of using the Cloudflare CDN, the service (even on their free tier) provides some great security benefits to give you and your customers peace-of-mind.

Cloudflare provides a web application firewall (WAF), which Google defines as “a security tool that protects web applications and APIs by monitoring, filtering, and blocking malicious traffic”. Think of this as any other “firewall”, that sits between your website and your guest (technically defined as a client endpoint). As traffic flows to your website, these requests are analyzed and vetted, filtering out dangerous, suspicious, or malicious traffic.
Simply due to the massive volume of WordPress websites on the internet today, WordPress is the most hacked platform on the planet, so reducing the potential for shenanigans is important.

How to Create a New, Free Cloudflare Account

1. Visit the Cloudflare Plans page by following URL: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/
2. Choose the “Free” Cloudflare plan by clicking “Add a Website” under the Free column.
3. If this is your first Cloudflare account, continue with one of the various authentication methods, verify that you’re human, and click the Sign Up button at the bottom of the page:
   1. You can create an account using your Google credentials
   2. You can create an account using your Apple credentials
   3. You can create an account using your email address and a password.
4. On the following page, enter your domain name in the box below the text “Enter an existing domain”, then click the Continue button. Please make sure to enter just the root domain, without any sub-domains. For example, “reachfarther.com” instead of “www.reachfarther.com”.
5. If prompted for a plan again, choose the “Free” plan.
6. Cloudflare will then attempt to retrieve your DNS records and recreate your zone file. At this step, if you’re a ReachFarther customer, please skip to the bullets below.

For ReachFarther customers, please also follow these steps:

1. ReachFarther will handle the transfer of your DNS records to Cloudflare, so there is no need to complete the activate steps on your own.
2. Instead, please add our authorized ReachFarther user to your account so that we may access and update your settings. Click the back arrow at the top right of the page to get back to your Account Home page.
3. From the Cloudflare Account Home page, open the Manage Account tab on the left.
4. Click Members.
5. Click the “Invite” button next to the Invite Members to Join {account name}’s account.
6. Enter the email address(es) that were provided to you by ReachFarther and then click Add.
7. Under Scope:
   1. Operator = Include
   2. Type = All Domains
8. Under Account Scoped Roles:
   1. Click “Super Administrator – All Privileges”
9. Click “Continue to summary” at the bottom of the page.
10. On the summary, click the Invite button.