A few months ago, we told you a little bit about Cloudflare. CanSpace is a CloudFlare premium partner, so our clients get access to all of the tool’s powerful features free of charge.
Once logged in, the user will see tabs for Speed, Caching, Firewall, Crypto, Analytics, and more. All this effectively serves as a second website control panel, allowing you to modify all these features to get your site dialed in exactly how you want it. Here is a brief guide on setting up some of these key features in Cloudflare.
The first thing you’ll want to do is to familiarize yourself with your Cloudflare dashboard. From there, you can control all the settings for your site. It looks like this:
Here’s a run-through of all the different tabs:
Overview
This is basically a “Quick Look” screen that gives you some basic analytics – unique visitors, total requests, and some stats on site performance such as total data served, % cached, and total amount of data cached.
Analytics
A deeper look at some analytics, broadly divided into three tabs: Requests, Bandwidth, and Unique Visitors.
DNS
Gives users some options related to the hosting of their DNS records, though users may also choose to keep their records with the host rather than with Cloudflare.
SSL/TLS
This provides users with some security features related to SSL certificates (which everyone should have!)
- Off (not secure)
- No encryption applied
- Flexible
- Encrypts traffic between the browser and Cloudflare
- Full
- Encrypts end-to-end, using a self signed certificate on the server
- Full (strict)
- Encrypts end-to-end, but requires a trusted CA or Cloudflare Origin CA certificate on the server
Firewall
It has some very convenient features for setting up a firewall to block unwanted traffic to your site. You can basically set up a filter that catches visitors based on a slew of actions, like Country, IP, host, or path. Plus, extra DDOS protection!
Access
Allows you to manage the coordination between other applications you may use for your site and Cloudflare, to ensure that the two work nicely together.
Speed
A tab every website owner should be very interested in. Cloudflare runs a speed test and makes some recommendations on how you can speed up your site. Also includes some easy on/off switches for things like minifying Javascript/CSS/HTML for your site, doing some of the basic work that a dedicated optimization plugin might do.
Caching
Provides some settings for the cache, and also allows you to pause the cache when you’re doing development on your site and need to see changes in real time.
Page Rules
Page Rules let you control which Cloudflare settings trigger on a given URL. Only one Page Rule will trigger per URL, so it is helpful if you sort Page Rules in priority order, and make your URL patterns as specific as possible.
Network
This includes HTTP/2 settings, IPv6 Compatibility, and WebSockets.
Traffic
It allows you to turn on Cloudflare’s custom feature “Argo,” a service that uses optimized routes across the Cloudflare network to deliver responses to your users more quickly, reliably, and securely.
Custom Pages
Here, you can personalize the error and challenge pages that Cloudflare presents to your visitors.
Apps
It allows you to customize your Cloudflare experience by turning on and off a number of Apps Cloudflare makes for its users.
Scare Shield
A very useful tab that gives some extra security for the content on your site. For example, you can display obfuscated email addresses on your website and automatically hide certain content on your site from bots and crawlers Cloudflare deems are “disreputable”.
As you can see, Cloudflare offers a ton of features and flexibility for its users. That’s what makes it such a powerful tool, and that’s why we’re happy to offer it to every hosting account on CanSpace Solutions.
