Thread: Cloudflare to Improve Website Speed for SEO

Google has been paying a lot more attention to how fast a website loads these days and I wanted to pass on a service that I have been using to help improve my websites speed. The service is called Cloudflare and it is similar to a content delivery network, but much easier to install.

From their overview:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare's system gets faster and smarter as our community of users grows larger. We have designed the system to scale with our goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.

CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a simple change your domain's DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site's existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and we offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.

It can really improve a site, especially if you are using a shared server. I have also seen several of my sites that use the service speed increase and rankings increase slightly because they are simply faster. Anyways do a Google search for Cloudflare and I am sure you will find it. Or perhaps someone that can post links can add it below.

to be quite honest

the paragraph you noted sounds like pure sales hype. I've been hosting my own websites since 1999 and it all comes down to how well the network is built. It sounds like they're trying to play off the big cloud computing buzz... Which is exactly that people have been doing the exact same thing for 7-8 years and only recently are they rebranding it as cloud computing.

people take far too many assumptions about Google as fact. meaning just because it's a rumor doesn't mean it's true or that it will actually affect you. I wouldn't bother with this service but that's only because I have my own dedicated servers.

When it comes to getting ranked on Google I don't believe you will be negatively impacted in list your site is intolerably slow. And that's probably a general setting in Google. Meaning that just because site A is 2 micro seconds faster than site B does not mean speed is the reason.

People are always trying to look for an exact science when it comes to Google and search engine rankings. But over the years I've just done what makes sense and had no problem achieving first page rankings.

So to answer your question... I would buy into this platform which appears to be pure sales hype. Unless you are on a system that you know is unacceptably slow and need a solution.

You should try it. I was doubtful about the service, but after trying it on a couple of sites, that are on shared servers, it made a big difference in the speed of the sites. A lot of people start on shared servers and I think this service can really help them. They offer a free and a pro version, with the pro version offering a few more features, but for free you get a good taste of what the service can do.

"When it comes to getting ranked on Google I don't believe you will be negatively impacted in list your site is intolerably slow. And that's probably a general setting in Google. Meaning that just because site A is 2 micro seconds faster than site B does not mean speed is the reason."

Speed is indeed a factor in Google's algorithm. That being said, it probably isn't one of the major factors in ranking sites overall. The true benefit of having a faster site really has to do with a good visitor experience; many people will simply bounce from a site that takes too long to load.

In addition, since we act as a CDN by caching static content and distributing it across our network, site visitors will be routed to the datacenter that will deliver the fastest experience for them based on location.

This true it does affect your google ranking very smally but, still a little and everthing counts. So thanks for the share.