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How to Setup Cloudflare for Your WordPress Blog

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Cloudflare is a great service that enhances website performance and hardens the security. It will considerablyimprove page load times and will even save you on bandwidth.

Cloudflare is a must-have for small and medium sized blogs and websites.

It is basically a FREE content delivery network(CDN) with tons of additional functionality. Basic features areavailable for free, however, there is a paid option if you really need to push things up.

For majority of bloggers and business website owners, free version is good enough to go with.

How Cloudflare Works?

To take advantage of Cloudflare, you will have to map your domain on Cloudflare’s servers where static resources willcached and all other tweaks will be applied before sending visitors to your hosting server. Since all your traffic isfunneled through Cloudflare so it is filtered against malicious attempts and potential threats. Read more aboutFeatures on Official Website.

Here is an analysis of How Cloudflare can improve performance .

Difficult to understand? Don’t worry. I will teach you how to set it up for your website.

Pre-Requisites

There are no requirements from Cloudflare. The only thing you have to make sure is that your domain name isworking properly. If you have just bought a new domain name then you might have to wait for the domain propagationto complete before you can integrate it with Cloudflare.

Easy Steps to Setup Cloudflare

1. Go to Cloudflare.com

2. Sign up for a new account if you don’t have one.

3. Cloudflare will take you through few basic steps to add your site(s). Enter your site URL and click ‘Scan DNSRecords’.

4. Cloudflare will run a 1-minute scan to automatically fetch DNS details for your website. Click ‘Continue’ when youare done.

5. Next you will see all the DNS records associated with your domain. You can add a new record or delete an existingone as per your requirements. Click ‘Continue’ when you are done.

6. Choose ‘Free plan’ to get started. If you are interested in paid plans then check paid features.

7. Now you will see your current Nameservers and the ones which you have to use now. You can change your currentNameservers from your domain control panel. Don’t know how to do it? Read How to Change your Nameservers fromDomain Control Panel.

8. You will now see your Cloudflare control panel. Status will be ‘pending’ till the time your new Nameservers are notin effect. You can ‘Recheck Nameservers’ after about 24 hours.

By default, Cloudflare has already done most of the work for you, however, there are few options that you can playwith. Soon I will be writing a post on How to Configure Cloudflare for your Website.

You will start getting Cloudflare benefits once your domain Nameservers are configured properly.

Let me know in case you are facing any sort of problems, I will be happy to assist.

P.S. You need not to worry about transition of Nameservers because it will happen without any interruption.