Cloudflare's free plan adds a global CDN, basic DDoS protection and a firewall in front of your site.
Setting it up
- Create a free account at cloudflare.com and add your domain.
- Cloudflare scans your existing DNS records — check that the A record for your domain and the mail records (MX, and the
mailA record) were imported. - Cloudflare gives you two nameservers. Update them at your registrar, replacing ours.
- Wait for Cloudflare to report the domain as active.
Critical settings
- Mail records must be grey-clouded (DNS only). Proxying the
mailrecord breaks email delivery. - SSL/TLS mode must be Full (strict), with AutoSSL already issued on the server. Flexible mode causes redirect loops on WordPress.
- Under Caching → Configuration, create a page rule to bypass cache for
yourdomain.com/wp-admin/*.
Things to watch
Once Cloudflare is proxying traffic, your visitor logs will show Cloudflare IPs unless you install the Cloudflare plugin to restore real visitor IPs. Remember to purge the Cloudflare cache as well as your WordPress cache after design changes.
Note: moving DNS to Cloudflare means your domain's DNS is no longer managed in cPanel. Any future record changes must be made in the Cloudflare dashboard.
