Hi, We have a site that offers services in every province and territory. Our server is located in Vancouver so if we start using Cloudflare or another CDN will that (theoretically at least) help our site rank better in Toronto, Halifax, Montreal etc (ie, cities on the other side of the country from Vancouver and our server)? Thanks
CloudFlare will probably cut your page loading time roughly in half (that was my experience with CloudFlare). When you subscribe to them, they actually put your pages on their own servers, which then load them to surfers faster than your hosting server does (for example, GoDaddy or whoever you use). CloudFlare has numerous servers worldwide, including at least three in Canada — Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. The search engines like faster pages, so there's a chance that your faster-loading pages on CloudFlare will give you a small bump in the rankings. Unless you have a very large website, try CloudFlare's free option. I found a noticeable improvement with my pages' loading times. And CloudFlare, even on the free option, has some nice security features.
CloudFlare would definitely help you with that. They have attractive offers among other companies and really one of the best services.
Thanks guys, appreciate the feedback. Now I can convince my business partner we should use Cloudflare. Thanks, have a good day!
imaginexhacked, let me add one more benefit of a good CDN like CloudFlare. It's well known that surfers will leave a page quickly if it doesn't load reasonably fast. So you may actually keep more of the traffic that clicks on your page when that page loads faster than it loads with your current server.
Hi Jim, I think our bounce rate and percentage of 0-10 second visitors is pretty good but of course it could always be better. We had Cloudflare before but it caused some issues but I'm definitely going to set it back up. Thanks again for your insights!
Yes, I had one issue with CloudFlare too. I think it was a DNS issue that blocked out SiteLock. So for a short time I have briefly taken CloudFlare off my website. But I intend soon to talk with CFl's tech support, get that worked out, and get back onto their very fast CDN.
Doesn't it take up to 72 hours for the name server to propagate? https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/205195708-Step-3-Change-your-domain-name-servers-to-CloudFlare