Within one business day, your Customer Success Manager will invite you to an onboarding session to help you complete your security and performance configurations. Complete the initial steps in this guide to familiarize yourself with your new Enterprise account, features, and settings.
1. Create an account.
To set up a new Cloudflare account, enter your email address and a password, then log in to your Dashboard.
Your Customer Success Manager will activate your Enterprise account features and permissions. If you have any questions, please reach out to your account team.
2. Add your first website.
After setting up your account, you will be prompted to add your first site by entering your website’s root domain into the available field. You may need to contact your Customer Success Manager for site-specific provisioning.
3. Configure your DNS.
When you add a new site to your account, Cloudflare performs an automatic scan of common DNS records. To make Cloudflare your authoritative DNS provider, you will need to ensure that all records are copied over.
First, export your zone file from your current DNS provider and upload it to Cloudflare. Navigate to the DNS tab and click on the “Advanced” button under ‘DNS management.’ In the section marked “Upload DNS records,” select your zone file and upload it. Now, you can change your nameservers to the pair of Cloudflare nameservers that have been assigned to you. When successful, this change will take effect within 24 hours.
Need help? Follow our detailed instructions >
If you do not plan to use Cloudflare as your authoritative DNS provider, you can proxy a subdomain with a partial CNAME setup.
Navigate to the ‘Advanced Actions’ section in the Overview tab of your Dashboard and click on “Convert to Partial DNS Setup.” When a zone has been converted to partial setup, refresh the page and a TXT record will appear. To complete your CNAME setup, follow these three steps:
Subdomain → subdomain.example.com.cdn.cloudflare.net
Note: By default, our system automatically completes a DNS scan and pre-populates the DNS tab with records it finds, even though most records cannot be controlled in Cloudflare through a CNAME setup. You will only need records corresponding to the subdomains that you want to point to.
4. Configure SSL.
Cloudflare automatically issues an SSL certificate for each domain you add to your account. These certificates are provisioned through our Certificate Authority (CA) partners and managed by Cloudflare. Each SSL certificate is set by default to auto-renew upon expiration.
Cloudflare offers three types of SSL certificates to choose from:
You may also upload a custom SSL certificate to Cloudflare. To enable this option, navigate to the ‘Edge Certificates’ section of the SSL/TLS tab and copy/paste the SSL certificate file contents into the “Upload Custom SSL Certificate” text area.
Note: By default, only one Custom SSL certificate is allowed per Enterprise domain. Additional custom certificates may be requested from your account team.
After selecting your SSL certificate type, navigate to the ‘Overview’ section of your DNS tab to configure your SSL encryption settings. We recommend the Full (Strict) encryption mode, which requires valid certificates on both connections. This setting will require a valid certificate on your origin server that is either issued by Cloudflare or signed by a publicly-trusted CA.
5. Configure Page Rules.
Page Rules can be used to adjust Cloudflare settings at the URL level. Each Page Rule triggers a certain action when a request matches one of the URL patterns you define. There are several types of Page Rules that affect site functionality:
These will need to be configured first. Follow our Page Rules tutorial to implement one or more rules on your domain.
There are many other settings that you can control with Page Rules, including caching functionalities (e.g. TTLs and cache keys), security settings (e.g. turning the firewall on/off), and speed optimizations (e.g. configuring Polish or Rocket Loader). Learn more about recommended Page Rules for your site.
Follow the above steps for each domain you want to add to your account. If you have multiple domains to add, you can do so by separating them with a comma on the ‘Add a Site’ page or by using our API.
Your Customer Success Manager will invite you to a Cloudflare onboarding session to fine-tune your website’s security and performance settings.
Have a question? Many common issues can be troubleshooted with the in-depth documentation provided in our Help Center.
Still stumped? Connect with us via email at entsupport@cloudflare.com, or reach out with questions via the chat feature in your Dashboard.
Need advice on best practices for your site? Reach out to a member from your dedicated account team for assistance.
Dealing with a site outage or attack? Contact our 24/7/365 hotline at +1 (650) 353-5922.
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