Speed up your website for FREE with Cloudflare.
Cloudflare has become an industry-standard tool that’s completely free to use, and it helps you with both of these goals. But before I show you how to enable Cloudflare, let me take some time to explain what Cloudflare is and how it works. At its core, Cloudflare is a content delivery network and load balancing platform. That is the first thing your visitors will pass through when they visit your website. Now, traditionally with a website, a user types in your domain name get connected to your hosting account, and the server sends the website files back to the user.
When using Cloudflare, you’ll actually point your domain name servers to Cloudflare instead of your web post. And you’ll use Cloudflare’s DNS system to route the traffic to your web server. Now, this puts your web hosting account behind a wall. A user’s browser will first pass through the Cloudflare network before Cloudflare sends a request to your web host, and then your website files get sent back to the user through This has two insanely powerful advantages, security, and speed. Now I’m sure security is pretty easy to understand in this example. Since the user’s traffic passes through Cloudflare first, Cloudflare acts as a first line of defense and scans the traffic to make sure it’s legitimate before forwarding the request to your web host.
Simply put, so many websites use Cloudflare, that Cloudflare is constantly monitoring malicious IP addresses and is able to immediately take action across their entire network when a hacker or bot is attempting to visit any website on their Think of it kind of like a bouncer at a club. The bouncer is Cloudflare and the bouncer is part of the Cloudflare network. You can have a bunch of clubs with a bunch of bouncers that are all part of Cloudflare’s network. And if one bad guy tries to get into a club who shouldn’t be in the club, that bouncer immediately tells all the other bouncers in the Cloudflare network, hey, be on the lookout for this guy. He’s shady. If you see him, don’t let him into the club. That is what Cloudflare is doing with malicious traffic, trying to get into any website on the Cloudflare network.
Now research shows that Cloudflare is used by over 12% of websites on the internet. So Cloudflare has an insane amount of internet traffic to analyze and use as a reference to protecting your website. Cloudflare also brings speed benefits to your website. Cloudflare’s content delivery network is able to cash parts of your website files on their many servers around the world. And this means that your website is able to load faster regardless of where someone is geographically located. Even if they’re in France and your web server is in California. Cloudflare will be able to deliver small bits and pieces of the website from their server in France to help speed up the process and make your website smoother and faster for everybody The best part is, all of Cloudflare’s core features are 100% free to use.
I’ve used Cloudflare on all of my websites for years now, and I’ve never paid a penny. Before we get into how to set up Cloudflare, I wanna make it clear that this tutorial is specifically for WordPress websites or any website that uses a dedicated web hosting If you’re using a hosted website platform like Wix, Squarespace, or the GoDaddy site builder, these platforms tend to be picky about Cloudflare and require you to take extra steps to set it And it may not be necessary because a lot of site builders have their own internal CDN and security system that does exactly what Cloudflare does. Cloudflare is awesome though. So if you’d like to use it on your Wix or Squarespace website, I encourage you to do some research and see if it’s possible. But today I’ll be demonstrating how to set up Cloudflare with any cPanel web hosting account.
If you’re using a web host that doesn’t use cPanel, the process is exactly the same. I’ll just let you know the one step that you have to do differently when we get to it. All right, so I’ve got my WordPress website up right here. You can see it’s on my domain name, now, right now, the name servers are just pointed to my web posts. So if I go over to Dynadot here, this is where this domain is registered. And I click on it. You’re gonna see that my name servers are pointing to Namecheap or whatever web host you have. You may have Flywheel, Kinsta, Hostinger, Cloudways.
It doesn’t matter. You would have the web host name servers set up on your domain name, using the traditional method of pointing your domain to your website. So Cloudflare is gonna change this. So to get started, we’re just gonna go over to Cloudflare, cloudflare.com. And we’re gonna sign up here. We’re gonna create an account. Eh, I’m not gonna add it to my password manager.
All right, so right here, boom. And this is important because you need to confirm with the web host, that all of this is pointing where it needs to go. Now, I know this looks intimidating to you, especially if you’ve never edited DNS records before. You’re probably like, whoa, what the heck is this? But simply kick back out, consider me. It’s nothing to stress over, here is the important part.
This is what really matters. All of this can stay. You don’t need to do anything, but what you need to do is confirm that the IP address is correct on the root domain. Which is this, craylor.club. You’re gonna see a record with your domain name somewhere in here, in all of these records. And you’re gonna see what it points to. Now how do we confirm that this is pointing to the right place? Well, with any cPanel web host, it’s really easy. So I’ve got this hosted at Namecheap, and I can go over to cPanel here, and this is the panel that Namecheap gives you. cPanel is very common.
You’re gonna see it with a lot of web hosts, like GoDaddy, A2 Hosting, a lot of guys use cPanel. Even Hostinger uses cPanel. And you’re gonna see this section right here towards the top that says either shared IP address, dedicated IP address, or IP address. But what you’re looking for is you’re looking for this to match that record in Cloudflare. So we see 199.188.201.205. Now, if we go back to Cloudflare, we see that it’s the same. We see 199.188.201.205. Now, this is the critical part, these matches. So we’re good to go. If your records do not match, you’ve got a problem. Setting up Cloudflare and continuing is going to basically break your website. And then if it’s a really important website like for your business or something, you’re gonna have some panic because your website’s gonna go down.
So as long as this IP address right here matches this IP address in cPanel, you’re good to go. And this is a step I said would be different if you don’t have a cPanel web host. As long as you have web hosting, you can set up Cloudflare like this. But if you don’t have cPanel, your steps will differ because you won’t have this section right here at the top. So you may have to reach out to your web host. You may have to chat in, call in, and just say, hey, I’m setting up Cloudflare, what’s my IP address? And they’ll be able to help you out with that. All right, so everything else is good to go.
Cloudflare is really good about scanning everything and putting the important records in here. So now that we’ve confirmed, I’m just gonna click on continue. And this is the next step. This is where we make it official. And we point our domain to Cloudflare. And then Cloudflare is gonna point people to the web server, to that IP address that we just confirmed. So I’m gonna take the name servers here, and I’m doing this in Dynadot, but it’s really easy to change name servers on any domain registrar. Namecheap, Porkbun, Google Domains, whoever you’re using, it’s really easy. So I’m just gonna click to copy this name server, and I’m gonna go over to my Dynadot panel. And I’m gonna click here by this name server, and we’re gonna enter new or existing name servers. So on number one, I’m just gonna paste this in, adrian.ns.cloudflare.com. I’m gonna go back to Cloudflare.
I’m gonna copy the second one, which is Jasper. I’m gonna go paste that in and click save name server. Name servers are modified. That’s all done. I’m gonna go back to Cloudflare and say done, check name servers. Now, that is the final step here. They’re gonna want to know some information about SSL and how this is all going to work, how they’re gonna treat SSL certificates. If your site is using SSL, just go ahead and leave this on full. If you’re not sure, really honestly, I would leave it on full. And if you have any issues, you can go back and change this at any time.
The changes to it are pretty instant. So I’m just gonna say, leave everything the same on this page as is and click done. And that’s it, you’re done setting up Cloudflare. Now you’re gonna see this saying, hey, Cloudflare is not active yet. Cloudflare will activate itself as soon as the name servers point there. Now if you’re impatient, you can click this recheck now button and just periodically refresh the page and see if it’s actually set up or not. But Cloudflare is really good about checking this automatically. And they will actually send you an email as soon as Cloudflare is activated. So when you get that email saying your domain has been added to Cloudflare, everything’s set up. It is really important that you just confirm your website is working still. Go in it on multiple devices, on your computer, on your phone.
Make certain it is nevertheless working. Make positive that not anything broke. In fact, even before it says it’s working, you can start checking. I can go to craylor.club and just see that it’s still functioning. And would you see, it’s still functioning. Because we just want to check over the coming hours, over the coming days. Make sure that everything is functioning as normal because if it’s not and you’re unable to figure it out, you would change back to your old name server. So make sure you write this down, screenshot it, do what you need to do, because there’s no need to panic. If all else fails, and if everything just breaks and your site just isn’t loading and you did something wrong, you don’t need to panic.
Simply change it back to these old name servers, until you can step back, take a look, and figure out what might’ve gone wrong, But that’s it. Cloudflare’s been set up for your WordPress website or whatever website you have hosted on your web host. You’re good to go. And you’ll now enjoy the added security and speed benefits that Cloudflare gives you for free. So I hope this video helped you learn about the advantages of Cloudflare and how to set it up with your website.
It’s truly 100% free to use. So there’s no reason not to use it. With the increased traffic globally, due to everyone being at home, there’s never been a better time to speed up your website and protect it from attacks free of charge. So what do you think of Cloudflare? Did you use it before this video? Are you gonna set it up after watching this video? Or do you personally think it’s fluff and it’s unnecessary? I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments down below. And if you liked this video, do be sure to hit that subscribe button and click the bell. So you don’t miss it when I release new videos. With that said, I will catch you guys next time.