What is Cloudflare? How to improve speed & security on your site for free [Tutorial]

what if I was to tell you there is a magic service that makes a website faster more secure and saves you money on your web hosting and it's 100% free well there is and in this video I'm going to tell you all about content delivery networks let's go ahead and dive in everybody John here from end can mesh comm my goal is to help you find the perfect tool for your next project and in today's video we are going to upgrade one of my dummy sites one of the sites I play around with by installing a brand new CDN called CloudFlare but let's take a step back and talk about what a CDN is why it's important why it saves you money and why you should really be considering installing it on every single one of your websites that you own ok let's go for it ok so first things first what is CDN and what does it stand for well a CDN is a content delivery network and what that means is that instead of having a single web host a single computer on the cloud that serves all your information to your visitors of your website you're able to distribute all that information across hundreds of data centers a hundreds of computers across the world so that you can intelligently route your website to your visitor based on whatever is more convenient and faster for them so that's a really awesome thing right there and we'll be talking about CloudFlare in this video but there are many CDNs available that you could sign up with CloudFlare it has amazing support it has amazing integrations with a bunch of plugins and WordPress tools and hosts as well it's also 100% free for unlimited bandwidth they make their money because I have other upsells and you know additional bells and whistles you can tack onto the service but for beginning entrepreneurs it really is not needed at that stage in the game and if you pair up a CloudFlare service with a caching plug-in maybe an image optimization plug-in you will be doing incredibly well for your page speeds and your load speeds so why am I talking about this today well I ran a speed test report and honestly this is a terrible result this is one might play websites and it's partially because I upgraded to Gutenberg and maybe I did that a little too soon it really seems to have hurt my performance but when you're running speed tests one of the things that they recommend that everybody does on their speed test is to use a content delivery network they also say that's a medium priority it's not a high priority like images or making fewer external HTTP requests but it's a pretty important thing to do and that's because CDNs reduce the amount of ping or latency that your visitors have to experience before they can get your content and what that basically means it's the time lag between when they hit the enter button to find your website and they actually make contact with the server that has all your files and then the the downloading can happen from there so reducing ping is one of the big things that a CDN can do for you another thing that CD ends do is they help you by protecting your site against kind of malicious people you know bad bad people that are out there and it does that because hold on let me just find that page real quick let's go to cloud players home products CDN and so here you can kind of see a visualization of that so this is how CloudFlare works and basically your origin server may be somewhere here in the middle of the country but it's going to distribute that content all to all these other data centers so that wherever your visitors are coming from they're always going to get served the information from the closest possible place which reduces your ping there which is that 9 milliseconds here this is kind of the standard version here whereas everybody's pinging that one web host and this is going to do really two things one is it going to slow down the time they're gonna get the information they're looking for but it's also going to you know greatly increase the number of requests they're being made from your host server so if you are you paying by the bit you know we all kind of have caps on how much bandwidth we can have with our web hosts what it's happening on this CloudFlare version is it's actually sending versions of your website out to CloudFlare every now and then but not that you know not so much not with so much frequency that it really hurts your overall bandwidth but here every single time some is going into your server is making another request so that can add up to bandwidth over time and I kind of shows that as well and the other thing that is really beneficial is some of the security measures that are kept in place with C DNS and essentially because so many hosts use these content delivery networks to protect their content these CloudFlare is able to build up this huge database of all the know knows all the bad people that are out there and are able to intelligently protect you from them as they're going along so that's enough benefit of the content delivery networks I have more details in the blog post I'll link in the description below but let's go ahead and actually install this guy into one of my new websites so to do that we're just going to go to CloudFlare comm we're going to sign up for a new set up it'll ask you to get started and I'll put in my email address here and then you can if you want to get their information or not you can click there and create an account and that's pretty easy so no even need to go and confirm your website at this point you probably will at some point though we'll add our site and I'm gonna add conversion sandbox to this guy it'll add that in and what this is going to do at this point is go and kind of explore kind of look to see all the different things you have going on with that website and it's doing it all on its own no technical need for you at the moment so that's what it's just saying it's gonna figure out automatically importing all your DNS records so we'll go ahead and hit next here and then you select your plan I'm gonna go with the free plan on this one you can see it gives you that global content delivery network unmetered mitigation of DDoS this is one of the security attacks that can happen on your on your site and a free SSL as well so if you look at what you get additionally you know firewalls mobile and image optimization so image optimization is awesome but for $20 a month you can get a awesome plugin to do that on your website as well and then additional page rules so not a whole lot more to go to that $20 per month which is why I recommend just get started with the free plan and then grow it if you need to will see one free website and confirm okay so now it's going to go and find all the DNS records here and I yeah so you got all these different records here and if you are techy you can try to you know adjust these or make it whatever you needs to be I am NOT so I'm gonna go ahead and continue let's take a look at it real quick I'll say continue and now it's going to give you to all of these name servers it's gonna give you two name servers this is the most technical side of the entire process so what you're gonna want to do here is get log in to where you registered your domain not necessarily your web host so you may use GoDaddy or Namecheap to register your domains but then host your websites with SiteGround at Bluehost or one of those so you need to find your domain registrar for this website for whatever reason I have it a registered at in motion hosting so I'm gonna go here and go to point my domain and you can see this is where my is pointing to Bluehost I'm gonna remove those guys and go back into CloudFlare and take Fiona and put Fiona into my primary and take Zeus and take the Zeus into my secondary and I'll submit those okay so now I see that my request has been completed on my domain registrar's side let's head back to CloudFlare comm and say continue and there's some help here if you need help getting started there but we'll say continue and boom so you are literally done with the setup here so what's going to happen is it's going to take some time for the internet to realize you made those changes and it's going to start populating CloudFlare and doing all sorts of cool things so give it a day or so normally doesn't take a full day but give it some time to propagate but we're gonna go ahead and just kind of poke around here and what you'll be able to see which we can probably see in my other accounts here but we won't go into that right now but you'll be able to see exactly how much CloudFlare is saving you you'll be able to see how many requests are being made through CloudFlare how many of them are cached and how many are uncashed and uncashed basically means it's having to actually hit your real web hosts but the cached are ones that never that traffic never even hits your web host it's pretty awesome you'll see the bandwidth you've saved by doing this and all sorts of cool things and your you'll even be able to set up different speed settings so minification all these different things which you know I'm not the most technical to be able to go through what all these do but I will kind of give you a word of warning here you have to be careful if you have w3 total cache or WP rocket or one of those caching plugins or maybe even caching provided by your host like I know site ground has their site ground optimizer as well the more time you stack the same thing on top of each other so for instance it you'd stack minification on one tool and the minification on CloudFlare you can start to get some weird results so leave the default settings on for at first make sure you get CloudFlare running and see if your websites are responding as it should and then if you want to go and continue to tweak to your heart's content do one setting at a time and just check to make sure that it doesn't do any damage to your website okay a little public service announcement that's lessons I've learned the hard way okay so really we're done at this point and let me show you a website that is running with CloudFlare as well let me go back to here to the speed testing and so income mesh is running on CloudFlare and i also upgraded this guy to wordpress 5.0 so i think my performance is actually going to be not very exciting I was getting right around one second load times and then today they started to get three second load time so not thrilled with that but let's see how it looks today okay again not a very exciting result 4.1 seconds not thrilled with that but you can see that once you've implemented CloudFlare it will show you that you do have a content delivery network and that will increase some security increase a lot of benefits for your website okay so I hope that was helpful so kind of to wrap up this quick video CloudFlare is a content delivery network that will help speed up your website by making sure it's delivering on the best hardware that's out there your website to your visitors as quickly as possible it'll also increase your security by being able to run all your traffic through their very advanced filters to make sure that only good people are trying to access your website it will also save you money by reducing the number of queries and number of polls that get sent over to your actual web host by routing as much of their traffic through their caching systems as they can I'm John from in kamesh com if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and hit the bell be notified when I come out with more content like this and leave a comment below do you use CloudFlare or a different CDN let me know what you think about CloudFlare and what you think about this tutorial and the style that I'm presenting I want to make sure that I make this content as relevant and as useful to you as possible I'll see you guys in the next video take care

Channel: Unbeatable Tech

Views: 90,185

Keywords: Wordpress, Build Websites, Wordpress Tutorial, Cloudflare, CDN, MaxCDN

Id: NV2eKYmQF6Q

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018