Having a website allows you to market your business online. It gives you credibility, and gives the impression that your business is established and successful.
When your clients look at your website, they should be able to see the information that they are looking for as quick as possible, so your website needs to load fast.
How can you make your website load faster?
There are a number of ways on how you can make your site load faster. One of them is by connecting your domain to Cloudflare.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American web infrastructure and website security company, providing content delivery network services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security, and distributed domain name server services.
What does Cloudflare do?
Cloudflare is a big network with servers located all over the world. When you connect your domain to Cloudflare, your information is saved in their network, and whenever a user accesses your website, their computer will be pulling the information from the server closest to their location, making the load times faster.
Why should I connect my domain to Cloudflare?
Aside from making your website’s load time faster, Cloudflare also comes with additional security features such as protection from DDoS attacks, malicious bots, and other malware.
How do I connect my domain to Cloudflare?
Step 1: Create an Account at Cloudflare
To register for an account, go to Cloudflare.com and click ‘Sign Up’, or click here.
Type in your email and preferred password.
Enter your domain. This has to be your actual domain. Remove the “www” (e.g. mydomain.com). The domain has to be an immediate child of an official top-level domain (or one of its official second-level domains). my domain.co.uk is permitted, but mydomain.someisp.co.uk is not.
Step 3: Choose Your Plan
Choose the plan that is best for you or your business. You can choose from Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. Each level higher costs more per month, but offers more features and security, depending on your needs.
Step 4: Change Your Nameservers
You will need to change the your current nameservers to the nameservers that cloudflare will give you. You can do this by logging in to your account with your domain provider, and change the nameservers from there. Copy the nameservers given by Cloudflare, and paste them onto your domain’s nameserver.
Take note that it takes up to 48 hours for the nameservers to be updated. In some cases, the transfer process is faster.
You can check if the nameserver has been updated by clicking “Check nameservers” on your account dashboard. If it hasn’t been updated yet, check back after 48 hours.
After your domain’s nameserver is updated to that of Cloudflare’s, your website now has additional security and will have faster load times.
