'Net Features : cloudflare

Spring Cleaning: Tips For Your Website

Administrator — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:43:00 GMT

By Kristin Tarr, CloudFlare Communications Manager

With Spring just around the corner, people are beginning to focus on what they need to clean out and improve—things that need a bit of an update going forward in 2013. For most, it’s a thorough cleaning of the house and home - getting rid of clutter, old newspapers and leftover holiday trimmings that have been lying around for far too long. But for some, Spring cleaning can mean taking stock in an important part of your business, and making it really shine. If you run a blog or website, it might be time to do some online cleaning to make sure you’re ready for a happy, successful 2013.

Here are five tips on how to do your own website spring cleaning:

1. Search and rescue - find the bottlenecks

Performance problems can exist on your site that you’re not even aware of. These bottlenecks include bad code, JavaScript errors and 404 errors. These can all impact the performance of your site from behind the scenes. There are a wide variety of online testing tools that can help you identify these potential problems. Some of the tools you can use to test your site are:

Webpagetest.org

Pingdom

GTMetrix

Google PageSpeed Online

In addition to testing your site to see which files may be causing issues, the services above will also recommend some fixes to help you improve the performance of your site.

2. The faster, the better

We’ve all seen those AT&T commercials, the ones with children offering suggestions and metaphors for why “faster is better.”—and let’s face it, they’re right. So while you might not be able to tape a cheetah to your website’s back, you can use performance boosting and monitoring services for your site like CloudFlare, PageSpeed and other CDNs. You should also check with your hosting provider to see what third-party services they offer for simple performance boosts that are easy to turn on from your control panel.

3. Work with what you’ve got - optimize your database

Making sure that queries are being processed as fast as possible is another way you can help fine-tune your website. You can do this by reducing the size of your graphics and images by keeping forms and reports short, optimizing JavaScript and CSS, and by compacting regularly - delete old objects and records.

4. Sweep up the social media plugins

The trend today is simple - if you didn’t tweet it, tag it, like it, vote on it or poke it, then it probably didn’t happen. As a site owner, you would like to have every social media channel highlight every move you make, but having a lot of different social media widgets or plugins on your site can seriously impact its performance. Try pruning the ones that are a "need to have" and focus on building a network with the social media channels that work best for you.

5. Throw out the trash - remove ad programs that aren’t performing

While monetizing a website is important for most site owners, a decent number of them go overboard and throw multiple ad platforms on their site to help bring in revenue. The problem here is that too many ad widgets can slow down your site, while also possibly discouraging visitors from clicking and staying (remember that people want to engage with your site's content, not with multiple ads for various products that may not be targeted to them.)

Take stock of which ads are working and remove the ones that are not. There are also many other site monetization options out there that don’t rely on ads, like VigLink and LinkWorth, which both monetize the links within your blog or website.

So while you’re cleaning out your closet in your personal life, be sure to give your business’s website some attention this spring – and let us know if any of these tips work for you.

About the Author:

Kristin Tarr is CloudFlare’s communications manager and oversees the company's marketing and thought leadership initiatives. Kristin hails from California’s Central Coast and is also a running fanatic, having run numerous half and full marathons. She graduated from CSU, Chico with a degree in Public Relations and Political Science.

Cache Anything and Speed Up Load Times

Michael Garrity — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:05:00 GMT

One of the most common methods that webmasters use to speed up their sites is to cache content (such as HTML pages, JavaScript, images or CSS) to reduce bandwidth and server load and speed up delivery.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of content that can’t be cached, and when websites need to utilize that it can be problematic for performance and user experience. CloudFlare, a provider of cloud-based services to help secure and accelerate websites, is looking to alleviate this problem for its users by “caching the uncacheable” through a new Web optimization software called Railgun.

CloudFlare users are already at an advantage, because the service will not only cache content, but also deliver it to users from its various datacenters around the world. However, according to the company’s blog, “only about 66% of content is cacheable,” meaning the remaining 34 percent has to be recovered from the server of origin. That is why the company developed Railgun, which can cache dynamically generated and/or personalized Web pages using a scheme that reduces bandwidth and speeds up the loading process.

Railgun starts the acceleration process for non-cached pages by speeding up the downloading of the initial HTML, which must happen before the rest of a page can even begin downloading.

Primarily, though, Railgun is able to send Web pages across the ‘Net much more quickly because it will compress them to an astonishingly smaller version, which it’s able to do by looking at changes on a page “from download to download.” It will reduce the pages to just 0.65 percent of their original size to ensure that they travel faster from the origin server to the user’s screen, no matter where they are.

This new service is currently only available for CloudFlare Business and Enterprise customers as a part of their service packages.

GlobalSign Accelerates SSL-Certified Pages

Michael Garrity — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 16:15:00 GMT

One of the world’s largest SSL certificate providers, GlobalSign, has partnered with Web performance and security company CloudFlare to significantly accelerate the load speeds and reduce the geographical delay of SSL-secured Web pages. And best of all, this speedy service comes at no additional charge or configuration requirements for GlobalSign customers.

After integrating the technology of these companies, GlobalSign has been able to increase load speeds by as much as six times that of traditional SSL. The hope is that by noticeably improving the performance of SSL-secured Web pages, the company will foster wider acceptance and adoption of SSL certificates that help Web businesses reduce the risk of data breaches, compromised sites and, most important, customer identity theft and fraud. Of course, it also helps that faster performing websites tend to increase customer loyalty and diminish site abandonment rates.

Historically, many sites have refrained from implementing SSL on their sites outside of their login or checkout pages out of a fear that it would disrupt the end-user experience. But now, as a result of its collaboration with CloudFlare, when browsers visit GlobalSign-protected websites, they can validate the certificates much quicker. This is because of CloudFlare’s network of 23 global datacenters that reduce the amount of time it takes a Certificate Authority (CA) SSL to deliver an SSL certificate’s validity status to the browser.

In addition, this CloudFlare’s international network provides resilience to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to protect GlobalSign Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) services, which indicate the validity status of its SSL certificates.

But that’s not all in the way of recent news for GlobalSign. Earlier this week, the company announced the general availability of its new (and free) SSL Configuration Checker online service that lets website administrators confirm that their SSL is configured correctly across all of their websites; the service even provides actionable insights and guidance on how they can fix any questionable or exploitable configurations, as well.

When SSL is accurately configured, it dramatically improves the performance of the website and strengthens its ability to secure the site, offering a defense against cyber criminality, such as SSL BEAST, CRIME and other attacks that target faulty SSL configurations.

The service integrates Qualys SSL Labs assessment technology, which audits SSL ecosystems, raises awareness and provides tools and documentation for website owners that allow them to improve their SSL implementations.

SSL Configuration Checker can be used by any organization by simply visiting sslcheck.globalsign.com, where users just have to enter the URL of the site they want to check. Following a quick test, the service will return a letter grade of the site’s configuration, along with a brief explanation of any issues it finds and some remediation steps they can follow to correct the issue(s).

The tool is already available in an array of languages, including Dutch, English, French, Japanese, German, Spanish and Russian.

CloudFlare Comes to Certified Hosting

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Shared web hosting provider Certified Hosting just introduced CloudFlare functionality to all its shared and reseller hosting services. The service is integrated within Certified Hosting's existing cPanel web hosting setup.

CloudFlare is a "firewall in the cloud" service designed to help secure websites and protect them against online malicious attacks. Visitor traffic is passed through one of 13 data centers where it can be monitored. In the event of a traffic spike, CloudFlare checks for signs of spam, DDos attacks and bot crawling. What really makes CloudFlare a valuable platform however is that since it acts as a proxy to numerous websites, it effectively learns from attacks and grows more intelligent over time.

“CloudFlare takes security off of the list of things our users have to manage for themselves,” says Kacy Carlsen, co-founder and CEO of Certified Hosting. “After selecting a security level for their website, our shared web hosting users can let CloudFlare manage their security with no further input required. Even better, in the event that a web hosting server does become overloaded with disruptive traffic, the CloudFlare system automatically calls upon a cached version of the website from one of the distributed cloud servers. Our customers can be completely assured that their website is available to end-users consistently, and is always performing at its best.”