If you have ever thought of building a website for your company or have already made one, you may have some idea about what Cloudflare. But for those who don’t, Cloudflare is a service that protects websites from all sorts of attacks or bot spamming, while simultaneously optimising website performance and reducing load times.

To know more about Cloudflare, you will first need to understand about CDNs.

What are CDNs and how do they work?

CDNs or Content Delivery Networks are services that have a big responsibility for delivering content over the internet. CDNs are used often all across the globe. Online tasks such as shopping online, learning new things, streaming videos, use CDNs to handle their websites.

The main job of CDNs is to reduce latency between the client and the server. Latency at times can be a huge problem when it comes to surfing the internet. Many websites have their servers located far away from your current geographical location, and that can cause a lot of lag while loading websites. But CDNs like Cloudflare are here to resolve issues like this.

They optimise the performance of a website by a large extent by caching any static content on the website. They create a copy of your website and store it so when a client requests the server with the support of the DNS, the CDNs interpret this earlier and help load the sites much quicker by loading the previously stored static content first — hence reducing page load times.

This static content is updated at regular intervals of approximately 15 minutes. Overall, CDNs place the website’s content on various servers all over the world to load content faster irrespective of your geographical location. It works much faster than requesting to a server that is thousands of kilometres away.

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Why is Cloudflare used?

Cloudflare is an all-in-one solution to all your website related problems, and it is highly recommended that you use some sort of CDN if not Cloudflare for your website to implement various security factors along with other benefits.

CDNs provide additional benefits other than just the performance and optimisation,

Improved Website Load Times

This is one of the main reasons you should consider using a CDN in the first place. It helps in reducing latency when someone is trying to access your website and hence serves content quicker to the visitors.

Security and DDoS protection

CDNs are very useful when it comes to protecting your website from DDoS attacks, data breaches or spamming bots. CDNs also make use of captcha to protect a website from bots or any other malicious attack.

SEO

CDNs can help improve the SEO score of your website by increasing the loading speed of your website and in-turn gain a higher rank on Google’s speed ranking factor in its SEO algorithms. So, the faster your website loads, it will be more likely of good rank in the search engine results.

So using a CDN or Cloudflare for your website may not be a bad decision if you need it. There are many factors when it comes to whether you should use a CDN or not. Your website’s user base and the scale of your website may be two of the most important ones.

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