We recommend all our clients use a service called Cloudflare to improve the security and performance of their website (and other online services). Cloudflare has been around for almost 15 years and currently services close to 20 percent of all websites.
Their free tier offers some excellent benefits that are hard to match with any other DNS provider.
Security
DDoS Protection
In a DDoS attack, a malicious attacker floods a website with a large volume of traffic to prevent legitimate users from accessing it. Cloudflare continually analyzes traffic across its entire network and automatically mitigates attacks by filtering out malicious traffic before it reaches your server.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
The WAF detects and mitigates malicious requests based on a free ruleset configured to protect against common vulnerabilities in many content management systems, including WordPress.
Bot Protection
Optional bot protection can identify and block automated traffic to protect your website from easy-to-detect bots and/or AI bots.
Under Attack Mode
Under Attack Mode can be used as a last resort during a cyber attack. Real users can validate and still access your site while suspicious traffic is blocked. Hopefully, you never have to use it, but when you do, it can keep your site available when it would otherwise be unreachable.
Performance
Global Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN distributes your static assets, like images and files, to data centers near your end users to make your site load faster. Cloudflare provides free access to an enterprise-level CDN in over 330 cities across 120 countries. With their network, approximately 95% of the world’s population can access your content in less than 50ms.
Content and Protocol Optimizations
Cloudflare provides a number of automated tools to improve the speed and reliability of your website and regularly adds new features.
Page Rules
Page Rules allow you to handle things like redirects before traffic ever reaches your web server, reducing server load and latency for site visitors.
Always Online
Optional Always Online saves a limited version of your site to show users if your web server is ever unavailable for any reason.
Getting Started with Cloudflare
To begin using Cloudflare, we’ll set up an account for you and share full ownership access with you. After that, we’ll help make sure all your existing DNS records are replicated and assist with changing your nameservers to Cloudflare.
Moving your website to Cloudflare does not change or interfere with your email hosting or email accounts. Cloudflare is simply an additional layer of security and performance in front of your website and DNS.
Your existing email provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or others) will continue to work exactly as it does today. During setup, we replicate all existing DNS records — including mail-related records — to ensure nothing about your email configuration changes.
Think of Cloudflare as an extra protective and optimization layer, not a replacement for your email service.
Once your site is live on Cloudflare, you’ll have full access to the account and will be able to make any future DNS changes there (or let us help you make the changes). Even if you decide to move on to a new website in the future, you’ll be able to keep your Cloudflare account and continue using it indefinitely.
