A CDN—content delivery network—changes where a visitor’s request is served from. Instead of every request going back to the origin server, copies of the content sit on CDN servers. The network uses intelligent resolution to send each visitor to a machine that should respond fastest. Because CDN providers usually run multiple data centers, that choice is often a nearby one. The practical effects are a faster page load and less traffic pressure on the origin.
Cloudflare is one provider that offers a free tier. Its CDN service comes in three plans: Free, Pro, and Enterprise. For a small site, the Free plan is usually the starting point.
Cloudflare’s infrastructure includes nodes in San Jose, California; Chicago, Illinois; Ashburn, Virginia; Tokyo, Japan; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. That gives it a presence across North America, East Asia, and Western Europe. For visitors in mainland China, traffic generally goes through the Tokyo node. WebLuker, an alternative, has nodes inside China and covers both China Telecom and China Unicom; overseas visitors to WebLuker generally go through China Telecom nodes along the eastern coast.
Signing up for Cloudflare’s free plan is straightforward. Go to cloudflare.com. Near the bottom of the homepage, the Free, Pro, and Enterprise plans are listed. Choose the free option and click “Sign up now!” The registration form asks for an email address twice, a username, and a password.
After that, enter the domain and add it. Cloudflare scans the existing DNS settings in the background. A moment later, the domain’s DNS records—A records and others—appear. If nothing needs changing, continue to the next step. Cloudflare then gives you the nameservers it wants the domain to use. Change the DNS delegation at the registrar as instructed; the update can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
On a blog hosted abroad, the difference was noticeable: pages loaded much faster after Cloudflare’s CDN was in place. There is a tradeoff, though. After changing a WordPress theme and uploading new CSS, the update may not show up immediately. Caching introduces a delay, and the new files appear only after some time—there is a synchronization step involved. That is a minor inconvenience. Theme changes are infrequent, and the main work is still writing.