Accelerate Internet Applications to Increase Conversion Rates
Deliver fast, rich user experiences for Internet applications that increase engagement and conversions, while reducing costs.
Consumers expect web pages to load quickly. Slow page load times can lead to high bounce rates, page abandonment, and lower conversion rates. Web pages are becoming increasingly complex and users are more globally dispersed; which degrades the user experience. Cloudflare brings content closer to your users by caching static web content on its network. Image files can be optimized to significantly improve load times, and dynamic content can be compressed and routed on the fastest, least congested path to the end-user.
Global Scale
Cloudflare’s global Anycast network consisting of 180 data centers spans across 80 countries, reducing latency and time to first byte by delivering content closest to visitors.
Ease of Use
Setting up Cloudflare takes as little as 5 minutes. The easy-to-use dashboard enables quick configuration of fine-grained functionalities to improve the performance of complex applications.
Integrated Security & Performance
Cloudflare includes integrated security services to defend against DDoS attacks, customer data breaches, and abusive bots, while preventing performance trade-offs.
Challenges Affecting Performance
Network characteristics that can impact performance: the number of roundtrips to establish a connection, number of requests, latency of packets (distance or throughput), client-side render times, and varied payload sizes. Additionally, the following factors can affect Internet application latency:
Heavy and Complex Web Pages
The average page size continues to increase, whether it is because of complex CSS, high-quality images and video assets, or extensive usage of javascript snippets. The average size of websites continues to increase, from 2011 to 2017 the average page size has increased by almost 3x.3 Larger web page sizes (the ‘payload’) increases the amount of data which must travel over the network to be rendered by the visitor’s browser, slowing down loading speeds.
Interactivity and Personalization
When applications use APIs to fetch dynamic content to support personalization and interactivity, the number of connections and trips to origin infrastructure increases, resulting in performance degradations and poor visitor experiences.
Globally Distributed Visitors
As modern web page visitors become more globally dispersed, content must travel longer distances, sometimes to countries with slow or unreliable networks. For example, a website with an origin server in San Francisco might have an equal number of global visitors as it does local and global visitors will experience increases in latency.
Cloudflare’s Performance Services
Every Cloudflare data center runs an integrated stack of performance features which address the most common causes of poor performance. These features help solve many of the core problems that slow down the delivery of applications over the Internet. From fast web address lookups to accelerated delivery to the origin server, Cloudflare speeds up traffic at key points in the life of a request.
Key Results
2.7 TB
monthly bandwidth savings
10x - 15x
traffic spikes with sustained performance
40%
web performance gain with Argo Smart Routing
Read the Case Study
Jared Hales
Director of Engineering
More Cloudflare Performance Use Cases
Accelerate Mobile Experiences
Mobile clients introduce performance and content delivery constraints which hurt user experiences. Deliver fast mobile experiences that increase engagement and conversions, regardless of distance to origin servers, device types, or network health.
Ensure Application Availability
Overloaded or unavailable infrastructure prevents users from accessing applications. Keep Internet applications fast, available, and scalable, even during unexpected traffic spikes or infrastructure outages.
Cloudflare Features
Cloudflare's Performance and Security Services work in conjunction to reduce latency of websites, mobile applications, and APIs end-to-end, while protecting against DDoS attack, abusive bots, and data breach.
Performance
Cloudflare Performance Services improve conversions, reduce churn, and improve visitor experiences by accelerating web and mobile performance, while keeping applications available.
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Content Delivery Network (CDN)
With 180 data centers across 80 countries, Cloudflare’s Anycast CDN caches static content at the edge, reducing latency by delivering assets as close as geographically possible to visitors. -
Website Optimizations
Cloudflare includes a suite of web optimizations to improve the performance of Internet assets. Optimizations include the latest web standards, such as HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3, as well as proprietary enhancements for images and mobile device visitors. -
DNS
Cloudflare is the fastest managed DNS provider in the world, routing over 35% of all global DNS traffic. Cloudflare has multiple ways to achieve maximum performance for online assets. -
Load Balancing
Cloudflare Load Balancing provides load balancing, geo-steering, monitoring and failover for single, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments, enhancing performance and availability. -
Argo Smart Routing
Argo Smart Routing improves Internet asset performance on average of 30% by routing visitors through the least congested and most reliable paths on Cloudflare's private network. -
Railgun™
Railgun compresses previously unreachable web objects by leveraging techniques similar to those used in the compression of high-quality video. This can result in additional performance increase. -
Stream
Cloudflare Stream makes streaming high quality video at scale, easy and affordable. -
Workers
Cloudflare Workers let developers run JavaScript Service Workers in Cloudflare's 180 data centers around the world. -
Mobile SDK
Cloudflare’s Mobile SDK provides visibility into application performance and load times across any global carrier network.
Security
Cloudflare Security Services reduce the risk of lost customers, declining revenues, and degraded brand by protecting against DDoS attacks, abusive bots, and data breach.
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Anycast Network
With 180 data centers across 80 countries and 30 Tbps of capacity, Cloudflare’s Anycast network absorbs distributed attack traffic by dispersing it geographically, while keeping Internet properties available and performant. -
DNSSEC
DNSSEC is the Internet’s non-spoofable caller ID. It guarantees a web application’s traffic is safely routed to the correct servers so that a site’s visitors are not intercepted by a hidden “man-in-the-middle” attacker. -
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade web application firewall (WAF) detects and block common application layer vulnerabilities at the network edge, utilising the OWASP Top 10, application-specific and custom rulesets. -
Rate Limiting
Rate Limiting protects critical resources by providing fine-grained control to block or qualify visitors with suspicious request rates. -
SSL / TLS
Transport Security Layer (TLS) encryption enables HTTPS connections between visitors and origin server(s), preventing man-in-the-middle attacks, packet sniffing, the display of web browser trust warnings, and more. -
Secure Registrar
Cloudflare is an ICANN accredited registrar, protecting organizations from domain hijacking with high-touch, online and offline verification for any changes to a registrar account. -
Orbit
Cloudflare Orbit solves security-related issues for Internet of Things devices at the network level. -
Argo Tunnel
Cloudflare creates an encrypted tunnel between its nearest data center and an application’s origin server without opening a public inbound port. -
Access
Secure, authenticate, and monitor user access to any domain, application, or path on Cloudflare. -
Spectrum
Spectrum protects TCP applications and ports from volumetric DDoS attacks and data theft by proxying non-web traffic through Cloudflare’s Anycast network.
1 Schurman, Eric, Bing and Brutlag, Jake, Google Search, “Performance Related Changes and their User Impact” 2009 Velocity Conference
2 Simic, Bojan, “The Performance of Web Applications: Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second” November 2008, Aberdeen Group
3 “HTTP Archive” http://beta.httparchive.org/reports/page-weight?start=2017_01_01&end=2018_01_01&view=grid
