How We Help with Cloudflare Enterprise for Security and Performance
Included in:
All Plans
All our plans include Cloudflare Enterprise, which is their highest tier of service and support. This helps your site load faster for visitors and stay secure and stable under pressure.
Cloudflare is a cloud-based “proxy” service that sits between your visitors and your server, routing traffic through their 330+ datacenters around the world.
It’s incredibly powerful and robust, but also so feature-rich that it’s complex to manage properly. That’s where we come in! We configure and manage the firewall and content distribution network (CDN) in a way that protects your site, keeps pages fast, and handles the caching details you may not want to think about. Of course, we keep adjusting over time as things evolve.
How we use Cloudflare to benefit you
Cache everything
We cache everything at Cloudflare’s “edge,” including HTML, so your site loads extremely fast for visitors, no matter how far they are from your server. Smart Tiered Caching helps get the content into the global caches faster.
Traffic spike? No problem.
Got a big traffic day, or a blog post that went viral? Sweet! Cloudflare can serve a cached page thousands of times per minute without flinching.
Speed up uncached content, too
When something isn’t yet (or can’t be) cached, we use Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing features to get it to your visitors faster — about 25% faster, on average. Especially for sites where users are logging in, that makes a noticeable difference in performance.
Firewall rules for WordPress
In addition to Cloudflare’s Managed Firewall Rules for WordPress, we add our own Custom Firewall Rules developed over time specifically for our clients’ needs. We block common malicious traffic, flood attacks, and brute-force login attempts before they reach your server. And we keep adjusting as the world evolves.
Bot filtering that protects real traffic
We use Enterprise Bot Management and site-specific rules to stop bad bots without getting in the way of real visitors. You keep the real traffic while junk traffic stops causing problems.
Managed Challenges & Rate Limiting
It’s not always as simple as “block or don’t block.” We set up Managed Challenges that let real humans through but still block the bots (with no “click all the sidewalks” required) — and have Rate Limiting rules to prevent brute-force attacks.
DDoS Protection
Cloudflare automatically protects against Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, kicking in within seconds to block it. Simple as that.
Migration and ongoing DNS support
We handle all of the setup, of course, and it’ll be seamless with no downtime. We’ll help you with any other DNS settings in the future, too.
Why this matters when traffic gets real
You can certainly run a site for months and never think about any of this. But then a post takes off, a bot campaign finds your login page, or an update clears the cache at the wrong moment, and suddenly all of it matters a lot.
The sites that handle those moments well aren’t “lucky.” They have a configuration that’s been set up thoughtfully and kept current. Cache, firewall, and bot controls work together rather than independently, and it requires someone who knows WordPress paying attention when things change.
That’s the part we own, to make sure things run smoothly, like we were able to do for Kurt Schmidt at Inside the Magic:
Kurt Schmidt“Yesterday was our busiest day of traffic in our history with 3 million pageviews and a whopping 1.7 million of those coming to a single article. Additionally these last three days is the first time we’ve ever had 3 consecutive days of 1 million plus pageviews back to back to back. This is beyond any traffic levels I’m used to and seeing the website still able to hold up so well is incredibly impressive.
“THANK YOU from all of us here at Inside the Magic. We truly appreciate everything you have done.”
When your caching, firewall, and bot filtering are managed well, your site feels faster, more stable, and less stressful to run day to day.
If you want help deciding which plan is the right fit for your traffic and support needs, compare plans or we’re happy to talk it through together.
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See everything included side by side and pick the right plan for your site.
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Things you might be wondering (aka: FAQs)
It’s important to us that you always have direct access and control of your site’s DNS, since we don’t believe in “vendor lock-in.” So we recommend having your own free Cloudflare account, and then we can manage your DNS settings there. If you’re currently paying for Cloudflare, you’ll probably be able to downgrade to the free tier to save a little money, too.
NerdPress can then route your site’s traffic through our own Cloudflare account, giving you all the benefits of Cloudflare Enterprise with us handling the management.
Then get ready for an upgrade! 😉 We take care of the Cloudflare and DNS transition carefully, for a seamless transition.
We’ll need access to your Cloudflare account to make the DNS changes. If your DNS isn’t yet on Cloudflare, we’ll also need access to your registrar (where you purchased your domain) so we can help get that set up. Don’t worry, we’ll make it easy by walking you through getting us access, and then we’ll take it from there!
That’s fine! Although it’s easier if we can make any changes ourselves, we understand that trust has to be earned, and some IT departments are wary. We’re happy to work directly with them, passing along any changes for them to make instead.
Not all bot traffic is harmful, and blocking everything at once usually causes more problems than it solves. (That’s why we don’t use Cloudflare’s “Super Bot Fight Mode”!) Instead, we review review traffic patterns, separate useful crawlers from abusive ones, and apply targeted blocks or challenges where it makes sense.
Yes! We offer Precision Bot Blocking, which uses Enterprise Bot Management to makes it easy to block AI crawlers for your site with great accuracy. We can block specific companies, or you can opt in to our managed lists. For example, you can choose to block all “training” crawlers, but still allow “search” and “user” crawlers (so you can still get cited in AI responses).