A recent Forbes report indicates that around 30,000 websites are hacked daily, which usually are small business sites. As technology continues to evolve rapidly, cybersecurity will continue to be a main priority. If cybersecurity protection measures are ignored, this can lead to serious financial and legal issues, as well as your business site being shut down. To prevent cyber attacks and threats from targeting your website, this article will discuss how a popular content delivery network (CDN) called Cloudflare can keep your site safe, boost your site’s loading speeds, and make your site easier to maintain.

What is Cloudflare?

In 2009, Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway initially founded Cloudflare as a project to prevent hackers from gathering email addresses from websites. That same year, the company’s focus transitioned into offering effective, affordable web security solutions. Cloudflare began noticing a connection between their security software and slower website performance. These observations led the company to find a solution that boosted site performance and site security simultaneously. This led them to their current solution: a content delivery network (CDN) consisting of hundreds of data centers located in over 100 countries across the world. Cloudflare’s CDN includes site caching, site security protection, optimizing site speeds, and more.

How Does Cloudflare Work?

Now that we know what Cloudflare is, it’s important to know what their CDN does.

Site Caching

Their CDN uses site caching, which is the process of storing data that is used often, so users can enjoy faster site loading speeds upon future visits. Cloudflare routinely checks their client’s websites, to ensure that their cache is updated. When users visit their site, the CDN will quickly serve that cached data to the visitors accessing your site. No matter where your visitors are located, they will download your site from a location closest to them, which means quicker site loading times. With other 150 data centers worldwide, this plays a key role in optimizing your site speeds.

To boost site speeds, Cloudflare uses a technology called Anycast to route site visitors to the datacenter closest to where they are located. Indeed, this technology helps cached sites load twice as fast as the average site loading speeds without site caching. When every second counts for driving site traffic and conversions, this is a great reason to incorporate Cloudflare into your site optimization and security strategy.

Decrease Server Load Times

Cloudflare’s site caching will fully handle some of those site requests, so your server will not have to handle all of its site traffic. Indeed, this means your server won’t be slowed down as much and more users can enjoy using your site at the same time.

Filter Incoming Site Traffic

To boost your site’s security, Cloudflare’s CDN filters incoming site traffic on a regular basis. This acts as an extra security layer that looks for possible cyber threats and attacks that could harm your site, use up your bandwidth, and compromise you and your customer’s personal information.

Types of malicious traffic that Cloudflare detects, filters, and reroutes before reaching your site’s server:

  • DDoS attacks: this attack floods your site with traffic, so it makes your site temporarily unavailable.
  • Comment spam
  • Content scraping

Why is Cloudflare Important for Your Site?

As you can see, Cloudflare’s content delivery network provides a variety of benefits for site owners. Like any new year, technology will continue to evolve, which requires staying up-to-date on the latest cybersecurity threats and security preventative measures. Cloudflare makes it possible to protect your site in a way that doesn’t slow down your site loading speeds or decrease site optimization. If you are interested in learning more about website security, contact Awesome Website Guys today. We would love to be your new website partner.