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How to set up the Cloudflare CDN for Magento 2

Cloudflare offers a robust CDN for Magento 2 stores. It intelligently routes content using the most efficient network pathways based on geography — for faster page loading.
CDN Cloudflare Magento 2 Nexcess Performance Security
5 min read

Overview

With a distributed network of servers spread over the globe, Cloudflare offers a robust CDN for Magento 2 stores. It intelligently routes requests for content using the most efficient network pathways. Such a platform provides your valued visitors access to website-cached static content based on their location — for faster page loading.

The CDN for Magento 2 also serves as a proxy server; your IP will be hidden when you enable Cloudflare. The only people who will know the IP address of your server are you and your server administrator due to this masking. The server IP won’t change when Cloudflare is enabled; instead, it will be hidden.

As soon as Cloudflare is established for your domain, the CDN and site optimization will begin.

The benefits of the Cloudflare CDN for Magento 2

  • Performance. Enhance efficiency on an ultra-private network by adding more edge caching and Brotli compression.
  • Image enhancement. Allow on-the-fly edge image conversion for next-generation picture formats is one of its key features.
  • Enhanced protection for websites. Websites can be shielded from various threats by using Cloudflare’s security capabilities, such as SQL injection, DDoS, and cross-site scripting attacks.
  • Limit the bandwidth over usage. Perform automatic content caching and sending it to the user from the server that is nearest to them.
  • Minification of code. By reducing the number of characters in CSS and JavaScript files and eliminating superfluous ones, minification enhances the speed of websites.
  • Load balancing. Offers high availability and enhanced performance in addition to load balancing, achieved by dividing incoming traffic among several servers or data centers.
  • Enhanced SEO. Your website’s search engine ranking can be greatly improved by faster loading times.

Step by step instructions

Nexcess is thrilled to present the Performance Shield feature set to its clients in collaboration with Cloudflare. For Cloudflare integration with your Nexcess account, these combined functionalities are available with the enterprise performance and enhanced security protection add-on, known as Performance Shield from Nexcess and powered by Cloudflare.

The product name is shorthand for the Nexcess Enterprise Performance and Protect add-on. This premium set of bundled features guards the performance integrity of your website by anticipating the newest security risks. Cloudflare’s WAF, DDoS protection, CDN for Magento 2, and continuous network prioritization are included in all our Performance Shield plans that can be bought per website. Now, for optimal performance protection, you can upgrade one or multiple websites on your hosting plan with Nexcess.

  1. Login to my.nexcess.net.
  2. Click on the Performance option from the Magneto plan list:
  3. You must point your domain to Nexcess nameservers to enable Performance Shield. Once this is done, please select the Activate Performance Shield button.
  4. There are three types of Performance Shield plans that may be purchased, and the cost is per website per month:
  • Small plan at a cost of $5 per website per month
  • Medium plan at a cost of $10 per website per month
  • Large plan at a cost of $10 per website per month

Please select the desired plan and then select the Add Performance Shield Plan button. Please note that the Performance Shield features will take some time to take effect as they are rolled out to worldwide caching servers.

It is advisable to activate during a non-peak hour for your website. Please give Cloudflare up to 24 hours to cache your content and provide top-notch performance no matter the website visitor’s global location.

Frequently asked questions

Check the A record for the domain. If the Cloudflare Performance Shield is active and the A record points to a Cloudflare IP address, then it uses the Cloudflare CDN as expected:

Root@viproot-Vostro-15-3568:~# dig +short techworkq.com 

104.16.81.94 
104.16.82.94

The Performance Shield add-on is 100% of the time used together with the Nexcess Edge CDN. Features included with Performance Shield are mostly related to security enhancements, such as WAF, DDoS protection, and bot protection. At-the-edge image conversion along with CSS and JS edge minification are the performance features that come with the add-on.

To be transparent, implementing the Performance Shield add-on might not demonstrate any faster page loading speeds than utilizing the Nexcess Edge CDN by itself, even with the slight improvements in auto-minification (CSS and JS) and image conversion at the edge. You can expect a slight improvement in front-end performance, though.

Performance Shield can be added to managed hosting for any PHP-based application hosted at Nexcess, including WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento — as well as for any application found on a Flexible Cloud Plan with us.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was to provide you with further insight into the different ways we can set up a CDN for your Magento 2 online store hosted on Nexcess servers.

By reading this post, we hope you have a better understanding of the entire process, and you can easily configure a CDN for Magento 2 without any confusion. We suggest you buy a Performance Shield plan for your domain if site speed is your objective.

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