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How to improve your site using Cloudflare.

Hello to my first actual blog post! So, probably, a lot of you are using cloudflare. I guess thats also why you read this - well, as you can see in this graph I found some while ago, the marketshare of cloudflare just as a CDN is massive. Cloudflare Usage But it not just serves as a CDN. It’s functions reach from DNS, to proxying, to DDOS protecting, just to name a few. And, while it’s great on the webadmin’s part, there are a lot of problems on the client’s side, especially if you’re trying to use tor or most of the vpns. But that isn’t part of this blog either, even though I’m probably going to mention it soon-ish.

Improve the clients experience

Alright, so this part will vary for your thinking sometimes, but should be fine most of the time.
Most of this was found by just administrating some sites (in fact, i use cloudflare rn too), so it should work without any problems for almost all hosting solutions.

Enable Tor traffic to reach the site directly

This is quite a easy one, just go to Security > Firewall Rules and click “Create firewall rule”. Give it a fancy name, and allow Country | equals | Tor and action allow. Tor Firewall rule This, at least for me, does not get your site ddosed faster. I am NOT responsable for any ddos or other attacks, coming from enabling. As always, DYR (Do your research). If you, as a web master, know you’re being attacked more often, you shouldn’t enable this. But for anyone else, it’s a nice thing for people circumventing censorship or just wanting to be anonymous to do.

Caching settings (production)

So, I’d personally think these settings are only for production (e.g. you might not want to have your site crawled by the internet archive), but anyways, here we go!
All these settings can be found by going to Caching > Configuration. Ideas are sorted by personal usefullness

  1. Set the Browser Cache TTL to a higher time
    It speeds up your site, does not enable easy rearranging though (you might have to clear some caches then). I personally have it set to 1 day.
  2. Enable Always Online™ (may be already enabled)
    Does what it says, it “Keep your website online for visitors when your origin server is unavailable. Always Online serves limited copies of web pages to users instead of errors when your server is unreachable.”. You’ll have to agree to the terms, and you might as well DYR for the internet archive.
  3. Enable Crawler hints
    It tries to help with getting your site on search engines, didn’t help much for me though. You’ll have to, again, agree with the terms.
  4. Argo Tiered Cache (Under Caching > Tiered Cache)
    Helps if you need a CDN of some kind. Havent had that much experince my self, but it basically tries to find the Server with the lowest load to serve as a CDN.

Easy to remember urls

Now, this also needs proxying, like most things though, should have probably said it already but eh. Go to Rules > Page rules. Now you can redirect whole sites, like shown in the first screenshot: Full page redirect Otherwise, you can also just redirect one URL - of course, you shouldn’t have a website running there, for example: example.com/cool-site would go to this site on your web server, but if you use Cloudflare’s redirect for that URL, it would redirect to example.org. Anyways, that’s how you do it: url redirect Both times, either save the draft and deploy it later, or just save & deploy. The page rules have a lot of other nice functionality, but I found this to be the most useful one.

Network settings

So, under the tab “network” there are a few useful tips for overall better client accessibility.

  1. Enabling HTTP2
    Should be turned on by default on most web servers nowadays, but good for some extra speed regardless.
  2. Enabling HTTP3
    Makes Cloudflare’s proxy use HTTP/3 with QUIC for your site. I didnt actually know what QUIC was until now, I just enabled it. But let me give a quick explaination: It uses TCP for stability, but UDP for overall speed, and TLS 1.3 for security. Or as James Kehr says:

    QUIC uses UDP for ports and connectionless transport, then adds the resiliency of TCP, the security of TLS 1.3, sprinkles in a dash of commands and version control from protocols like SMB, and then mixes in a set of new protocol concepts and efficiencies to create something entirely unique in the protocol world.

Alright, that’s it for now, have a great rest of your day and try to make the web a little better. :D

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Sources:
https://kinsta.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/cdn-customer-count-chart-1.png - cloudflare-usage.png
https://dash.cloudflare.com - Screenshots of settings
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/edge-browser-cache-ttl/#browser-cache-ttl - caching ttl
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/edge-browser-cache-ttl/#browser-cache-ttl - ​​ Browser Cache TTL
https://blog.cloudflare.com/tiered-cache-smart-topology/ - Argo cache
https://blog.cloudflare.com/crawler-hints-how-cloudflare-is-reducing-the-environmental-impact-of-web-searches/ - Crawler hints
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/always-online/ - Always online https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/networking-blog/what-s-quic/ba-p/2683367 - QUIC