How to set up CloudFlare with WordPress on AWS

Nowadays, there are many tools, services and softwares in general that help websites to improve their performance, security and availability; CloudFlare just helps us to accomplish in the right way these three aspects, all in one tool. The purpose of this blog is to lear how to set up CloudFlare with WordPress on AWS.

To start, let’s say that it is true that CloudFlare has gained popularity in recent years, especially because of its function as CDN (Content Delivery Network) and certainly when we ask someone who has heard of this tool the first thing he does is to think of it as another CDN. But CloudFlare is much more than that. It has even more services that help us improve our site, and at the same time, to make it faster and safer for both, visitors and administrators of the site.

Before listing the services and benefits of using this tool, there is an important question that needs to be answered:

What is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare is a service that sits between the client’s browser and your host. It acts as a reverse proxy, which means that every request from your site will arrive first to CloudFlare, which redirects them to your host, receives the requested content and sends it to the client.

This feature along with other services offered by CloudFlare bring different benefits to your site, here I mention you some of them.

As CloudFlare receives all the traffic directed to your website, including regular visitors, attackers and malicious bots, it plays a very important role in security. It identifies and stops any attack before they reach your site.

By attacks I mean something like DDoS, SQL injection and any malicious attempt capable of penetrating the infrastructure where your application lives. CloudFlare also gives us the option to add an SSL certificate to increase the security and reliability of every user that visits your website.

If you want to learn more about “How to secure your website with CloudFlare” visit this link.

This is one of the main reasons behind why people use CloudFlare. It works as a CDN, whose main objective is to serve your site’s content to the visitor from a closer location. Since the latency that exists between your host and the client, it has an impact on the speed with which the content loads. CloudFlare helps to minimize this latency through its several data centers located in different parts of the world. This eliminates high request time as instead the requests going all the way to your server, the content is automatically sent to the user from the nearest CloudFlare data center.

To all of the above, it is also important to say that CloudFlare caches much of your web page, to be exact, it caches the static content (images, styles, text). This means that CloudFlare doesn’t have to be constantly requesting the content to your server, only for the dynamic content and the content that is not yet cached by CloudFlare.

As everyone loves the websites to load faster, this tool has a great relevance as a must have rather than another layer. For our server, it reduces the load time and the traffic it receives.

Another option that CloudFlare offers to improve the performance is the optimization of static content such as resizing images for mobile or web applications, compressing and minifying files to reduce the load on the site.

At last, remember that your site and servers are not exempt from having a failure and instability, so CloudFlare gives us the option to deliver the content from the cache it keeps, just in case that something bad happens and until the site returns to be available.