Best Cloudflare Settings for WordPress – Free CDN Settings (2021 New Guide)

You can easily make your WordPress site faster and more secure by using Cloudflare. This package offers a lot of benefits in one neat. But you need to set up this service first. In our post, we will provide the best Cloudflare settings for WordPress. Be with us and get the details.

If you install Cloudflare on your WordPress website, you will not only get a CDN to speed up the global delivery of your assets, but also you will get DDoS protection, DNS management and lots of other security features. Before install and setup, we should know some necessary information about Cloudflare.

What is Cloudflare and why use it?

Cloudflare is a cloud-based service that provides excellent free service which has been quietly making the web experience better for everyone. It also includes security features like SSL, visibility into the traffic to your website, and scalability features just like page caching. This service is helping millions of websites every day.

Best Cloudflare Settings for WordPress - Free CDN Settings

It will be easy to speed up your website by a significant margin with Free SSL and Cloudflare CDN. Most of the people know that Cloudflare is a free CDN network, and for some, it is a free web hosting platform. But the reality is Cloudflare works as a bridge between your Web host and domain.

Typically it creates multiple copies of your website’s cached web pages. Then it hosts them from different locations around the world. It can serve your website directly to your visitors from their closest location. For your kind information, Cloudflare has more than 165 data centers around the globe, which are powering billions of web pages.

Let’s discuss some of the most vital benefits of using Cloudflare with WordPress.

  1. Due to the less amount of bandwidth usage, you have to pay a limited cost to the hosting companies.
  2. Having access to one of the best free CDN.
  3. It prevents the most common security vulnerabilities.

By using their cache, you can save more than 80% of your total bandwidth cost. In this way, the service saved almost 99% of the total bandwidth.

Best Cloudflare settings for WordPress: Easy installation and configuration

We will breakdown our Cloudflare settings into several parts. Configure, or setup the Cloudflare with WordPress is a lot easier thing, and it’s not rocket science. Usually, you need to change your domain nameserver for a complete setup. So let’s follow these settings step by step and cover the basic install.

Step 1: Create an account and attach your website

Create an account and attach your websiteAt first, go to the Cloudflare and create a new account to get started. Sign up for Cloudflare to add your website. Then Cloudflare will take you straight to the “Add your site” interface.

After that, you have to enter your domain name in the box and click on the “Add Site” button to add your site.

Step 2. Select a plan

In this step, Cloudflare will automatically query your DNS records. Once Cloudflare completes the scanning, it will provide you a nice little explanation. If you are satisfied with the explanation, you should go ahead and click the “Next” button.

Querying DNS recordsThe “Select a plan” window will appear now. They will try to convert you to its paid plans. But you are completely accurate to stick with the free plan for now.

Select Website PlanRemember that, the FREE plan comes with their CDN, page rules, and many other settings that will help to improve the speed or security. Try to start with the free plan. If you want to upgrade later, you can decide anytime.

Step 3. Verify the DNS records

The next window should ask you to verify your DNS records after you have confirmed your plan. All of these things might be confusing if you are not an experienced developer.

You don’t need to be worry because we can share an easy trick. You have to ensure that you see an orange icon next to the original domain name. It already should be fixed without you needing to take any action.

Cloudflare Settings for WordPressYou should click the “Continue” button which is located at the bottom when you verify that everything looks better.

Note: There may be some more complicated situations. If you are going to encounter them, you probably already know what you are doing.

Step 4. Change the Nameservers

Things might get a little trickier in this step. Here you have to change your domain’s nameservers to point to Cloudflare’s nameservers. If you do that Cloudflare will manage everything at a DNS level. In this section, you will found your current nameservers on the left, and the Cloudflare’s nameservers on the right.

Change the NameserversYou have to complete the process at the place where you registered your domain name. It might be a domain name registrar like “GoDaddy” or “Namecheap” otherwise it could be your actual host. You have to log in to your hosting account and find your nameservers then change them to Cloudflare’s nameservers. Try to click the “I need help changing my nameservers” link in the Cloudflare interface if you want help.

Also, you can ask your host’s support for assistance. Now, go ahead and click the “Continue” button, when you have changed your nameservers. To take effect, it might take some time for your new nameservers. You will have to see something like this until they change the nameservers.

Change the NameserversIf the Cloudflare interface has not updated yet, your site will not experience any downtime. So don’t worry. The interface will switch to this page when the change goes through.

Website StatusYou will found that you have successfully enabled the Cloudflare on your site when the status says Active. That’s all for the primary Cloudflare configuration process. Now move to some specific configurations which you should set up to make sure everything works right with your WordPress website.

Step 5. Basic settings

  1. Configure SSL: You must have to enable the free SSL certificate that is issued by Cloudflare to make your website encrypted. You also may use a custom SSL certificate which is provided by another issuer. Frankly, it will not make a much difference in a WordPress website.

That’s why you should choose Cloudflare Public SSL for your WordPress site. The “Crypto” settings have an option to order a free Universal SSL. There are also force “HTTP to HTTPS,” set “SSL encryption level,” and protect your “SSL website using HSTS” options.

  1. Create Firewall Rules: This feature will protect your WordPress Admin, plugins, and other sensitive areas of your website. It can create parameters which stop hackers from accessing them.
  2. Cloudflare Cache Setting: These necessary settings helps to control the caching levels and shows how Cloudflare caches your website. You may know that cache is a great way to improve your WP site speed. Cloudflare also works as a cache plugin to improve WordPress reliability drastically.

However, it serves your cache files via its CDN network around the world to reduce latency. It makes your website’s response time fast by providing cache files of different sites from the closest location to the internet users.

  1. Page Rules: Here, you can optimize the specific URLs for performance and security. You have to set these up based on your website’s requirements. For example, forcing the high security in your WP admin area or decreasing the bandwidth consumption by controlling Cloudflare’s cache refresh rate, and bypassing the cache.

All of these settings are useful for WordPress admin, staging websites, eCommerce pages, and dynamic content. In this option, you can create up to three-page rules for free. Cloudflare page rules define how a set of pages will respond when a visitor requests it.

In this case, custom page rule is one of the great tools of Cloudflare to enhance web performance and security. The best thing is you can set a page rule of your WordPress site to the optimal level.

Note: In the page rule settings feature, you have to replace yourdomain.com with your domain name. Because Cloudflare gives only three-page rules for a free account and you should make proper use all of them.

  1. Speed settings: The speed settings tab is another advanced feature of Cloudflare. In this tab, you have to minify the “HTML/CSS/JavaScript” files. Also, optimize the images and speed up the dynamic content with Railgun feature.

You can improve your AMP speed here by using “Accelerated Mobile” links option. Enable “Brotli,” which is similar to gzip feature. Asynchronously load the JavaScript with “Rocket Loader” feature. After implementing these settings, you will see a significant improvement in your website speed.

  1. Hotlink protection: This feature will prevent people from copying the images from your site and pasting them onto their website. However, it will consume your site’s bandwidth. You will found this feature in “Scrape Shield” settings.
  2. Rate limiting: Though its a paid feature, but it is beneficial. This feature prevents spammy crawlers from hitting your site too much. It also consumes bandwidth, which is a prevalent problem. To identify if it is happening to your website, you should check your hosting account for a tool like the “AWStats” or other similar tools. This feature will be available in the Firewall settings.
  3. Multiple CDNs: More data centers means a faster website. In this settings, you can generate CDN URLs that you can copy or paste into your cache plugin or CDN Enabler.

Conclusion

You should use these best Cloudflare settings for WordPress website, which can make your webpages load faster than your competitors. Thanks for being with us.

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