How to Set Up Cloudflare for Your Website

Cloudflare has been called a CDN but that label doesn’t quite fit the bill. It is a service that adds optimization, protection, and security to the websites that are part of its community. Threats are blocked, page loading times are optimized, spam is decreased, and attacks are dealt with before they are able to create a problem. You can hook the service up to any website as long as you own the domain in no more than five minutes, with no software or hardware necessary.

Let’s take a look at how to set up Cloudflare for your website.

In order to get started, first go to www.cloudflare.com and sign up for a free account.

Once you’re there, in the search bar under my websites, enter your domain name.

It will then begin to search for your domain name and its current settings. Once it finds your domain, you’ll see a screen like this:

These are the default settings that it was able to find from querying your domain name. You can see that since we’ve bought our domain name on Gandi.net (this is an old domain of ours), that they have already set up a lot of services for us.The only essential ones we actively need on this are the mail records, or the MX records, and the A record, or the IP, of where the server is hosted. Below you can see the full list of records that were brought up.

At this point, we can just click on through to the next step since the website is not currently live. We can always come back here later and easily change any of these settings.

The next step is to choose the level of service that you’d like to be set up with. It’s fine to leave this on the free version at this point.

Once we click through to the next step, it will tell us the name servers that we need to switch to.

A name server is a computer that is permanently hooked up to the internet which translates domain names into IP addresses. So when you type in www.growthlabs.eu your computer will look up the name server which maintains all of the information your site has; like where it’s hosted, what mail servers to use, etc.

In order to change our name servers, we will need to go back to where we registered the domain. In our case, it is Gandi.net.

On the right, we click on Modify Servers.  This takes us to the following page:

Change this to the name servers that were given by Cloudflare. 

Now back in Cloudflare, click done and you should see this-

Now you just have to wait for the domain to update. If you’ve used a good domain registrar, this typically happens pretty quickly, but it can take up to 48 hours for the domain server to switch.

That’s it!