CloudFlare:Why every blogger should use this CDN

Just recently I received a warning from Google about my site’s page speed saying;

Serve resources from a consistent URL

We have analyzed some of the pages on your sites that serve the most ads, and have detected Page Speed problems that create a highly negative user experience for some users. Frequently viewed pages on your sites are serving the same resource from multiple URLs, wasting client bandwidth and resources.

So I started looking for a solution on how to improve my site’s page speed to improve ranking, user experience and of course earnings, then I discovered CloudFlare Content delivery network (CDN) service. CloudFlare is a free CDN service that accelerates your site’s page speed. In case you don’t know what Content Delivery Network (CDN) means, check out this blog post titled “Content Delivery Network (CDN)”.

In this line of business every byte counts because your competitor could out-rank you because of a faster page speed. CloudFlare is a free CDN service that speeds up your blog and also provides some security measures that will make any blog served through their server difficult to be hacked. With over 23 data centers worldwide, CloudFlare automatically caches your blog’s static files and serve them to your visitors from their nearest data center and that way delivers a faster content to your visitors.

So I quickly carried out my blog’s web page performance test at Web Page Test and was marveled at the result, my page load time was high, image compression was poor, static content caching rating wasn’t too good, and there was no rating for CDN as I was not using any as at then. Then I went ahead to implement the free CloudFlare CDN service from my Arvixe hosting package.

Why do I need CloudFlare CDN service?

I know this is a question that may be going through the minds of so many of us, but here are my reasons.

Faster Page Speed:  When I analyzed the warning above it was obvious page speed problem was the main issue, so I figured if I can improve my page speed then the problem will be solved. CloudFlare works with both static and dynamic contents; it easily caches your static contents and allows the dynamic content served from your server to your blog visitors from one of their nearest 23 data centers worldwide. That way your content is delivered faster to your visitors which saves you and your visitors bandwidth.

Web Content Optimization: CloudFlare optimizes your web pages even better by combining multiple JavaScript files into a single request to avoid multiple network requests which could slow down your server. CloudFlare autominifies your HTML, CSS and JavaScript files stripping them of all unnecessary characters and save your bandwidth in that process. Your HTML is optimized to quickly render without waiting for other scripts that may slow it down. Contents are delivered based on the devices accessing them to maximize speed. Contents are also delivered compressed to reduce the size of all your resources. So whether you are browsing a site via a mobile smartphone or PC, CloudFlare detects the type of device and serve you content in a way that best optimizes that device.

Security: CloudFlare provides extra security to your blog, it protects you against comment spam, excessive bot crawling that may be wasting your bandwidth, malicious attacks like SQL injection and denial of service (DOS) attacks. Anyone aiming at attacking your blog will have to pass through CloudFlare’s  servers first as your files are well shaded behind their servers.

Analytics: CloudFlare provides you with extra and improved analytics for your blog no other analytics program may offer you; CloudFlare monitors your blog’s threats and provides you with a detailed report on them. Other features of the analytics include threat control, traffic control, search engine crawlers etc.

 How to Install CloudFlare for Your Blog:

CloudFlare has partnered with so many hosting companies worldwide to provide both their free and premium CDN services to web owners. Check CloudFlare Partners page to see if your web host is among the partnered hosts. If you find your web host among the listed partners, simply login to your cPanel under Software/Services you will see CloudFlare there, click on it to launch it.

Enter your email and create a new account, remember to tick the terms and condition check box. Then click the sign up button. Then click on the cloud next to the website you want to setup CloudFlare for, then you will receive a confirmation message saying that CloudFlare has been activated for your site.

I hope you find this tutorial interesting and useful, now I hope you can apply it for your blog so you can come back here to testify too. Have you had any experiences with CloudFlare or any other CDN before? What are the challenges you encountered, share with me on this post using the comment form below. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feeds.