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Cloudflare is an extremely useful service for Magento store owners. Off-the-shelf, it can help to improve website loading speeds, security, and the elasticity of hosting environments. However, as Cloudflare sits between shoppers and your Magento store, developers and admins can find it to be time-consuming to constantly log into your Cloudflare portal in order to flush Cloudflare’s cached files or adjust other important settings.
That’s why we created a Cloudflare extension for Magento 1 & Magento 2 stores. This free extension integrates Cloudflare features and functionality into the Magento admin to save time and frustration. So far, we’ve included the following functionality in our extension:
Global CDN Passthrough
The heart of Cloudflare, as a CDN, involves sending traffic through their server network, but you may want to disable that and send traffic directly to your hosting account in some instances, including for various testing. We’ve made this easier by adding the ability to enable and disable use of Cloudflare’s CDN right from your Magento admin.
Cache Purge
One of the biggest benefits of Cloudflare is the ability to store cached copies of the static portion of your site on servers in Cloudflare’s global network. Through this process, shoppers are served files from the servers closest to them. This leads to faster loading times, while also conserving resources from your hosting account. By default, Cloudflare caches images, CSS, and JavaScript.
However, off-the-shelf, it can be a pain to use this valuable feature set, since every time you change static content in your site, you need to login to a separate Cloudflare account in order to flush your Cloudflare cache and see your changes on your live website. To simplify this, we’ve added the ability to flush Cloudflare’s cache directly into the Magento admin panel. This speeds up the experience for Magento developers and admins by saving them from separately logging in at Cloudflare.com.
DDoS Mitigation
Denial of Service attacks, in essence, overwhelm your website with traffic. Cloudflare’s CDN can help to absorb and block many such attacks. They’ve created multiple levels of DDoS protection that you can choose from, with the highest setting being the aptly named “I’m under attack mode.” Different settings come with different tradeoffs. Our extension provides the ability to manage these settings directly in your Magento backend.
JS Minification
JavaScript files can be compressed with systems like gzip, however, compression alone isn’t the gold standard. If you want your JS files to be smaller and faster to load, you’ll want them to be minified. Cloudflare does this for you, and with our extension, you can enable and disable this Cloudflare feature in your Magento admin for various testing.
Image Optimization
To load a Magento site, a browser may need to call up many static images. In many cases, not all images that make it into your Magento site are optimized for the best possible loading efficiency and speed. With that in mind, Cloudflare provides their “Mirage” image optimization to resize images and their “Polish” image optimization to strip metadata and compress your images.
When managing settings for Cloudflare’s Image Optimization, you’ll get to choose between options like Basic (Lossless) and High (Lossy), which describe just how far you’d like Cloudflare to go in reducing the sizes of your image files.
Our extension brings these controls into your Magento admin as well.
Other helpful facts about our Magento Cloudflare Extensions:
– It supports multi-store use cases
– The installation for Magento 1 and installation for Magento 2 is quick and simple
– You can restrict access to this extension through Magento’s native Roles / Users
– For additional protection of your Magento 1 admin, we highly recommend our free 2-Factor Authentication extension for Magento 1
… and yes, it really is free. There’s no cost to purchasing this extension. You don’t need your website to be hosted at JetRails to use this extension either. You only need a Magento site and a Cloudflare account. To download this extension, simply visit our listings on the Magento Marketplace or our GitHub page.
If security is important to you, check out our Magento 1 two-factor authentication extension!
Interested in learning about more opportunities to improve your Magento hosting. The experts at JetRails are here to assist you! Please be in touch with the JetRails Magento hosting team to learn more about secure, fast, scalable, and reliable Magento hosting.
