Cloudflare is a great tool to help both in securing and speeding the delivery of your domain. Setup is straightforward, and we'll outline below how to get started quickly.
- If you don't already have a Cloudflare account, go to https://www.cloudflare.com and click the Sign-Up link.
- You'll be asked to enter the first domain for your account. If you already have public DNS records, click the Begin Scan option to retrieve your DNS records over Cloudflare.
- Once the scan is completed, review the resulting page and click to enable Cloudflare(click the cloud icon, orange is active, grey is not)
- Have sub-domains on your site also? You will need to enable CloudFlare for sub-domains
a. Toggle the sub-domain option by clicking the grey cloud icons next to their DNS entries - Almost done! On the next page, you will be given your nameservers to use for the Cloudflare service. Now you need to update your domain to use these nameservers so that Cloudflare manages DNS.
NOTE: Nameserver updates are not instant and can take up to 72 hours to fully propagate globally. However, if your site was already live and you aren't moving to a new server, you shouldn't have any downtime during the switch to Cloudflare.