Cloudflare is a system that acts as a proxy between your visitors and our servers with both free and paid premium options. By acting as a proxy, Cloudflare caches static content for your site, which lowers the number of requests to our servers, but still allows visitors to access your site.
There are several advantages to the Cloudflare system:
- Site performance improvement: Cloudflare has proxy servers located throughout the world. Proxy servers are located closer to your visitors, which means they will likely see page load speed improvements as the cached content is delivered from the closest caching box instead of directly off our server. Several researches have shown that the faster a site, the longer a visitor stays.
- Bot and threat protection: Cloudflare uses data from Project Honey Pot and other third-party sources, as well as the data from its community, to identify malicious threats online and stop the attacks before they even get to your site.
- Spam comments protection: Cloudflare leverages data from third-party resources to reduce the number of spam comments on your site.
- Alerting visitors of infected computers: Cloudflare alerts visitors suffering from an infected computer that they need to take action to clean up the malware or virus on their machine. The visitor can enter a CAPTCHA to gain access to your site.
- Offline browsing mode: In the unexpected event that our server is unavailable, visitors should still be able to access your site since Cloudflare serves the visitor a page from its cache.
- New site stats: You probably already have good tools to evaluate human traffic coming to your site, but no insight into search engine crawlers and threats. With Cloudflare, now you do.