Is your website slow or constantly under attack?
In a digital environment where speed and protection can make or break your business, having a powerful solution like Cloudflare is no longer optional: it's essential. This tool acts as an intelligent layer between your visitors and your server, ensuring performance, security, and availability.
In this guide, we explain how to get the most out of Cloudflare to improve your website, prevent attacks and offer a fast and smooth experience to your users.
Cloudflare's WAF acts as a protective shield against common threats such as SQL injections, XSS, and unauthorised access. This system analyses and filters traffic before it reaches your server, ensuring the protection of your data and users.
How to activate it?
1.Access your Cloudflare dashboard and select your domain.
2.Go to “Firewall” > “WAF”.
3.Activate the firewall and select predefined rules or customise your own.
4.Monitor activity logs to adjust protection based on detected threats.
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Cloudflare automatically detects and mitigates DDoS attacks, ensuring your website's availability even under high volumes of malicious traffic.
Key steps:
-Go to the “DDoS” section.
-Enable automatic protection.
-Set thresholds and analyse suspicious traffic to adjust it in real time.
Prevent malicious bots from overwhelming your website. With Bot Fight Mode or Bot Management (depending on your plan), you can identify, block, or challenge bots based on their behaviour, improving your website's performance.
Configure it in:
-Firewall > Tools > Bot Fight Mode.
-Or enable “Bot Management” for advanced control over malicious bots.
Encrypt communication between the browser and your server to prevent data interception. Cloudflare allows you to implement free SSL quickly and easily.
Activate it from:
-SSL/TLS > Overview.
-Choose the right mode: Flexible, Full, or Full Strict.
-Redirect all traffic to HTTPS to maximise security and improve your SEO ranking.
Reducing server load and speeding up content delivery is key to improving conversion. Cloudflare efficiently caches static and dynamic content, improving your website's loading speed.
How to set it up?
-Go to Caching > Configuration.
-Enable automatic caching.
-Use “Page Rules” to define behaviour on specific routes and ensure maximum loading speed.
Reduce the size of CSS, HTML, and JS files using Brotli, a compression algorithm optimised for the web.
Activate it at:
Cloudflare offers two powerful tools to reduce image weight without losing quality:
-Polish: Lossless compression and conversion to WebP.
-Mirage: Optimisation for slow connections and mobile devices.
Configure it from: Speed > Polish / Mirage.
This feature speeds up the loading of asynchronous JavaScript, improving site rendering time without affecting the user experience.
Activate it from:
If you have multiple servers, Cloudflare's Load Balancer allows you to distribute traffic between them, avoid overloads, and automatically redirect to active servers in case of failure. This ensures constant availability of your website.
Steps to use it:
Go to Traffic > Load Balancer.
Add your sources.
Configure load balancing criteria and enable monitoring to control traffic distribution.
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With a network of over 300 data centres worldwide, Cloudflare ensures that your web content is delivered to your users from the nearest server, reducing latency and improving overall loading speed.
Cloudflare is not just a security tool, it is a complete platform to enhance any website: more secure, faster and more resilient to unforeseen events. Take advantage of its potential to optimise your website.
Not using it yet? If your online project needs stability, performance and protection, Cloudflare can make all the difference.
And if you want to implement it without any hassle, at SW Hosting we'll help you every step of the way. From basic configuration to the most advanced rules, let us optimise your website for you.
