Cloudflare is a great service to speed up your website and make it safer. Plus for small to medium-sized websites they have a free version that works excellent. This service also boosts website scores for sites like GTMetrix. www.gtmetrix.com
Cloudflare works by having servers set up all throughout the world which serve up static files of your website like text and images. When someone visits your website, Cloudflare will determine which of their servers is closest and use that server to transmit static files to the visitor's browser. This process bypasses the static files coming from the original server. This can dramatically help speed up the load process.
For example let's say a visitor to your website is in Germany and the closest original server is in the United States. Now let's say your website requires around a typical 50 requests to fully load the website to the browser. A request can be an image, text, font, css style sheet, ect... that's part of your website. Now if each of these requests travel back and forth between Germany and the United States that's a great distance for each of those requests. This is where Cloudflare can boost loading speeds. Let's say Cloudflare has a server right in Germany that can bypass the requests to the original server in the United States. This would greatly reduce the travel distance for the visitor's browser to receive the necessary static files to load up your website.
Author: Jesse Lange