Technical Nuggets Of Knowledge: Geeky Stuff For Everyone.

You only get three free rules.What are your best options? UPDATED. I have researched this over and over just to be sure I’m using the best possible solution and have rewritten the whole article. I have also presented my findings to a managed WordPress web hosting CTO who uses Cloudflare as their foundational delivery system (not authorized to name names, sorry). I’ve also read volumes of community posts on Cloudflare. Oh, and have I done some testing, testing, testing. Bottom line, I have changed the whole approach to the Cloudflare configuration for WordPress and I’ll be covering more than just the Page Rules for a more complete solution this time. If you aren’t using WordPress, then this article is not for you. Hat Tip: Profile – cbrandt – Cloudflare CommunityProfile – sdayman – Cloudflare Community What is Cloudflare? Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Instead of your server having to serve up every file with each new, non-cached browser request, the CDN sends it from it’s network instead. This saves a bitload (pun) of data and time. There are many available but free is hard to pass up when your a small player in a cutthroat internet. A big part of SEO also depends on speed, as in how fast your page gets loaded, and if your on a shared hosting service then you should consider using a CDN like Cloudflare, which will speed up the delivery of your static content in mind blowing ways. This guide is focusing on a WordPress site configuration for Cloudflare in general. I haven’t researched the best use configuration for WooCommerce on Cloudflare Free as yet, but these rules should work just as well in WooCommerce or any other eCommerce plugin for WordPress. Also, this isn’t a WordPress beginner article, but if your willing to try, and search out the details, you’ll figure it out. Always ask questions and ignore the pompous self appointed Internet Gods (StackOverFlow.com) that tend to flame the little people. If I forgot to cover something here, tell me, or just ask questions in the comment section or contact form. What needs to be in place to begin? Create a free Cloudflare account. (Signup) Add your domain to the account and change your name servers at your domain registrar to the ones Cloudflare lists in your setup dialog. Your site should use DNS from Cloudflare in proxy mode (orange icon) to avoid issues and is required to use every aspect of page rules. More so for the paid version that allows URL forwarding. See “Why isn’t a Page Rule working? Cloudflare DNS is a Must. Page Rules require a “proxied” DNS record for your page rules to work. Page Rules won’t apply to hostnames that don’t exist in DNS or aren’t being directed to Cloudflare. In other words, you have to have your DNS running through Cloudflare’s DNS service and proxied for Cloudflare to cache your site to its CDN service. You could try using an alternate DNS service by moving DNS to Cloudflare to initially setup the site, and then move the DNS elsewhere, but why? I doubt anyone has a faster DNS service than Cloudflare and CDN network. Why Do I Need Cloudflare’s Page Rules? Page Rules give you more control over how Cloudflare works on a URL, domain, or subdomain. With Page Rules, you can customize Cloudflare’s functionality to better match your domain’s needs. This way, you can ensure that your website is running more smoothly, efficiently, faster, and more secure. How many rules do I get? PlanPage rules allowedFree3Pro20Business50Enterprise125 You can purchase additional rules (up to a maximum of 100) for domains in the Free, Pro, and Business plans. Rules are priced at $5 for each additional set of 5 rules, so 25 additional rules would be $25 dollars. A few considerations. I will not go into explanations of all rule features or settings. Please review the Cloudflare Tutorial for that information. I’m only going to explain the one’s we will use in this tutorial, but for quick reference I will include the descriptions table from Cloudflare’s tutorial also, just in case you want to experiment with other rule settings. The menu location info is based on the new Cloudflare interface. SSL Settings. SSL/TLS encryption mode. LOCATION: SSL > Overview The recommended choices are “Full” or “Strict”. FullEncrypts end-to-end, using a self signed certificate on the server/host. Full (strict)Encrypts end-to-end, but requires a trusted CA or Cloudflare Origin CA certificate on the server/host. Host and Cloudflare SSL Issues. I’ve come up against scenario where the “Full” SSL setting will not work on some hosts (very rare) and will need to be set to “Flexible” instead. If you site or browser throws an SSL error, or just won’t load after implementing these rules, then try Flexible for your SSL setting. If your host will work with it, “Full (strict)” is the ideal for your SSL settings. Cloudflare suggests “Full” for WordPress, they don’t explain why and I don’t do it myself if I can use Strict. If it works, you might want a more secure setting with Strict. SSL Certificates – If you don’t have one. LOCATION: SSL/TLS > Origin Server If you already have an SSL certificate on your web host then you can skip this. Cloudflare Origin Certificates. Generate a free TLS certificate signed by Cloudflare to install on your origin server. Just click the “Create Certificate” button and follow the steps given by Cloudflare. The only encryption levels are currently RSA (2048) and ECC. Origin Cert Use Caveat. Origin Certificates are only valid for encryption between Cloudflare and your origin server. In other words, if you eliminate Cloudflare as a CDN proxy service to your site, the origin certificate will not be browser valid as I understand it. Speed Settings. LOCATION: Speed > Optimization Auto Minify. OFF on the Optimization page (Control it in a Page Rule)The Cloudflare default for WordPress is enabled. If I decide to enable this, I prefer to control this setting in the last Page Rule. That way I know minification will not be an issue in my admin area or page builders. I typically leave Auto Minify set to OFF because in my experience, if you are using a plugin to minify these items, a plugin controls it better, and running it on Cloudflare slowed my sites down a tad. Run your own tests though to be sure for your particular site and plugins used, you might have a different experience. I use WP Rocket which is arguably the best for smaller WordPress sites, and Cloudflare is then getting pre-minified files to distribute across it’s network, no extra file handling needed. Also, I can control exclusions that way, which really is the biggest bonus to server-side WordPress plugin minification. If you do not have a caching plugin, you could turn these on at this setting, or set them to off and then turn them on in the third Page Rule (recommended). Brotli Compression. Definitely ON.Brotli is a modern, efficient lossless compression format supported by all major browsers. It offers better compression ratios than gzip and is gaining popularity rapidly. Cloudflare uses the Google Brotli library to compress web content dynamically whenever possible. Rocket Loader™ LOCATION: Speed > Optimization (Scroll Down) Turn this one OFFEven Cloudflare’s default for WordPress is off. Rocket Loader prioritizes your website’s content (text, images, fonts etc) by deferring the loading of all of your JavaScript until after rendering. This type of loading (known as asynchronous loading) leads to earlier rendering of your page content. Rocket Loader handles both inline and external scripts, while maintaining order of execution. Rocket Loader and WordPress. I always choose to turn Rocket Loader™ off because I have found it to be very problematic with JavaScript in general. I retested the use of it and still had all of the same problems with it. If it doesn’t break your site, by all means use it if it speeds your site up. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it actually slows your sight down, but this might be the case with small sites like mine. You might see different results in a larger scale website or platforms other than WordPress. I find that JavaScript deferment is best handled server-side by a caching plugin. In WordPress, the use of plugins changes the dynamics of JavaScript deferment. As such, some plugins break when deferred and need to be excluded from deferment and plugins allow for the exclusions you’re likely to need. Scrape Shield. Location: Scrape Shield (Bottom Left Menu) Scrape Shield has three settings that protect email addresses, images, and anything you enclose in the SSE tags. Each has it’s own on/off switch to enable or disable the feature. Although Email Address Obfuscation and Server-side Excludes are enabled here, I like to include them in my rules, just as an insurance that they stay on in the event they are disabled here somehow. Call me paranoid, but Cloudflare defaults have changed without warning before. Email Address Obfuscation. Definitely ON. Displays obfuscated email addresses on your website to prevent harvesting by bots and spammers, without visible changes to the address for human visitors. Email harvesters and other bots roam the Internet looking for email addresses to add to lists that target recipients for spam. This trend results in an increasing amount of unwanted email. Web administrators have come up with clever ways to protect against this by writing out email addresses (i.e., help [at] cloudflare [dot] com) or by using embedded images of the email address. However, you lose the convenience of clicking on the email address to automatically send an email. By enabling Cloudflare Email Address Obfuscation, email addresses on your web page will be obfuscated (hidden) from bots, while keeping them visible to humans. In fact, there are no visible changes to your website for visitors. MIME Type Note. For email address obfuscation to work in Cloudflare, a page must have a MIME type (Content-Type) of “text/html” or “application/xhtml+xml”...

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