As described in our earlier post “Add a website to cloudflare and configure domain DNS settings for using Cloudflare services“, if you have successfully added your website to cloudflare dashboard and website is working properly, in this post we will brief about some of the options required to be configured for best utilisation of free services from cloudflare.
Login to https://dash.cloudflare.com/login From the dashboard, click your active website, you will see a dashboard with following tabs as,
First two options “Overview and Analytics” shows the details of daily visitors, bandwidth saved, threats prevented etc.
DNS – this option provides details of auto detected DNS settings for your domain, if you have more than one subdomains and didn’t see that reflected in auto detect, you can manually add the same from DNS Records.
Crypto – this option provides details of your SSL certificate if you are using SSL certificate to serve your website with secure https:// and related settings. If you are using https:// , you can turn ON “Always Use HTTPS ” option to Redirect all requests with scheme “http” to “https”. You can also turn ON Automatic HTTPS Rewrites – Automatic HTTPS Rewrites helps fix mixed content by changing “http” to “https” for all resources or links on your web site that can be served with HTTPS.
Speed – In this tab, you will see performance improvement options. Tick all 3 options available in Auto Minify – Reduce the file size of source code on your website.
Enable Rocket Loader™ – Improve the paint time for pages that include Javascript.
If you are serving lot of images, and want those images to be optimised, you may consider selecting “Polish – Improve image load time by optimizing images hosted on your domain.” but this will require you to be a paid user.