How To Set Up CloudFlare in WordPress

CDN biz – How To Set Up Cloudflare in WordPress. One of the things that are important to consider in website development is to ensure that the website can be accessed quickly. Recently, this has become crucial considering that the loading speed of the website also determines the ranking on search engines. There are many ways to speed up your website, for example using a WordPress caching plugin such as WP Super Cache, image optimization, or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Of the ways we’ve listed, CloudFlare’s CDN is the most effective. Now, to install it on the website, there are several options for setting up Cloudflare that you can try.

In the following tutorial, we will review how to set up Cloudflare for a website, either using a WordPress plugin or without using a WordPress plugin.

What Do You Need?

Before you continue with the steps in the following tutorial, you must have both of these accesses.

• Domain panel control (Option A and Option B)
• cPanel hosting on Any cPanel Host (Option A)

There are two options for setting Cloudflare in this post, Option A and Option B. You can choose the method that is most suitable for you. If you are using Any Web hosting, it is advisable to use Option A. If you use other services or VPS, you can try Option B.

Option A – How to set up Cloudflare on ANY cPanel Hosting

How to set up Cloudflare on the Any Web service is quite easy for you to do yourself. cPanel is integrated with Cloudflare. Please login to your cPanel hosting at Any Web (for the cPanel link yourdomainname.com/cpanel). After you have successfully logged in to cPanel, please look for the Cloudflare menu, as shown in the image below.

Next, please log in using your CloudFlare account if it is already registered, if not, please register first. After you have successfully logged in to your Cloudflare account, please click the Domain menu and select Full Zone Setup, as shown in the image below.

Please wait a moment, the nameservers from Cloudflare will appear soon. Later you have to enter it in your panel domain nameserver settings.

In the next step, please enter your domain panel, then please update the nameservers using the nameservers provided by Cloudflare. See the sample image below for clarity. Here we use Any Web hosting panel domain.

In this step, the Cloudflare DNS setup process on your website is complete, please wait a maximum of 72 hours for the full pointing process.

Option B – General Cloudflare Settings

In general, there are 5 steps for setting up Cloudflare:

• Create a Cloudflare account;
• Adding a domain name to Cloudflare;
• Check the DNS records for your domain name on Cloudflare;
• Link your domain name to the Cloudflare nameservers;
• How to set up Cloudflare by installing and configuring the Cloudflare plugin on WordPress.

For more details, below is a complete explanation of the 5 points above.

Step 1: Create a Cloudflare Account

Please open the Cloudflare website and click the Sign-Up button to create an account with Cloudflare. Please fill in all required and click create an account.

If you already have a Cloudflare account, please skip this step.

Step 2: Adding a Domain Name on Cloudflare

After you have successfully registered with Cloudflare, you will be asked to add a domain from your website. Please enter the domain name and click Scan DNS Records.

Usually, this takes a few minutes for the scan to complete.

Step 3: Check the DNS Record for Your Domain Name on Cloudflare

After the scan is complete, you will see the DNS details of your domain. In this step, you can enable or disable CloudFlare for your subdomain. Cloudflare that is active has an orange cloud logo, while a silver one is inactive.

It is recommended to enable CloudFlare for the domain name and www as seen in the image above. This method allows CloudFlare to run properly on domains with www or without www. When finished, please click the Continue button to continue to the next process.

Important: Enabling CloudFlare for cPanel, email, FTP, or any other system is not recommended as it can cause various DNS issues.

Step 4: Linking Your Domain Name to Cloudflare Nameservers

In this step, you will be presented with choices regarding the Cloudflare plan. Please select the Free version and click the Continue button.

Now you will get the nameservers from Cloudflare. Please log in to your domain panel to update your server name according to the nameserver you got from Cloudflare.

Please click the Continue button.

Note: This usually takes a maximum of 72 hours for the full propagation process. When the nameservers have been successfully updated, you will receive an email confirmation from Cloudflare. You can also check the status via the Cloudflare website. Your website will not experience any downtime during this process.

Step 5 (optional): How to setup Cloudflare by installing and configuring the Cloudflare plugin on WordPress

If your website uses WordPress, you can install the Cloudflare plugin to make it easier to set up Cloudflare features in the admin dashboard. Cloudflare has a pretty good plugin for WordPress, with some fairly easy-to-use features, such as:

• WordPress optimization in one click
• Web Application Firewall rules
• Automatic cache cleaning
• Statistics
• Ability to change CloudFlare settings without having to enter the Cloudflare dashboard

Please login to your WordPress admin dashboard then install the Cloudflare plugin. When the installation process is complete and the plugin is activated, begin configuring the Cloudflare plugin. Please select the Plugins menu, select Installed Plugins, then on the Cloudflare plugin, click Settings to configure.

You will be asked to enter your email and API key. Please click the Get your API Key button from here. Then a pop-up will appear to log into your Cloudflare account, where you can find the API Key in the API KEY section.

After you get the API Key, please enter your email address and API Key into the previous form, then click the SAVE API Credentials button.

You will be directed to the Cloudflare settings page, please click the Apply button on the Apply Default Settings line. You can use CloudFlare’s default settings for WordPress websites.

We highly recommend that you enable Automatic Cache by clicking the Enable button in the Automatic Cache row. Enabling Automatic Cache can help clear the cache on Cloudflare when you update the design on your website.