How Cloudflare Can Change The Life Of Your Website
When you create a website, it’s easy to assume the site exists in its optimal form. However, a new website is like a newly-built house. Despite its purity and freshness, there are many areas where the standard specification may be improved or refined with strategic additions.
Introducing Cloudflare
One of the best ways to optimise your website is to call on the assistance of a company called Cloudflare. This web performance and online security specialist is a trusted partner of UK2, and we provide many of their products and services free of charge to our customers. Among the benefits of Cloudflare hosting are a reduction in page loading times – a crucial metric in SEO calculations, and vitally important for retaining site visitors.
Already used by over two million websites worldwide, Cloudflare hosting provides a number of valuable benefits:
- It could double your website’s speed. This is achieved with a variety of behind-the-scenes processes, such as caching small files for later use. JavaScript content is loaded without interruptions, and multiple network requests are combined into one.
- Cloudflare hosting provides protection against known threats. It weeds out spam in comments sections, blocking email harvesting or distributed denial of server attacks designed to force a site offline. Security settings can be adjusted at any time.
- Your website is replicated around the world. Having copies of your site data in 35 global locations means it’s piped to visitors from a nearby server, slashing loading times. It ensures the site will always be visible, even if a data center goes offline.
- Unexpected or periodic data spikes are catered for. Cloudflare hosting comfortably handles occasional peaks in site traffic activity, like a blog going viral or a retailer of seasonal items approaching its busiest trading period.
- Regular site analytics are provided. These are generated every 24 hours as standard, giving you a detailed insight into how your website is currently performing. It’s also possible to request analytics updates every six hours if more real-time data is important.
You might also want to consider our premium Cloudflare Plus service, which augments the standard platform with a number of additional features. These include resizing images for faster display on smaller screens, support for existing SSL configurations and accelerated responses to HTTP requests. All this can be added to your standard (free) Cloudflare package for just £8.99 per month.