Steps for Setting Up Cloudflare for WordPress :

1. Create your free Cloudflare account

To get started, go to Cloudflare and sign up.

On the next page, enter the domain name of the WordPress site that you want to use with Cloudflare and click Add site:

Next, you’ll be prompted to choose a plan. You can choose the Free plan for now, as it offers all the features most WordPress sites need:

2. Verify DNS records

Once you choose your plan, Cloudflare will scan your site’s DNS records.

If you’re not sure what’s going on here, don’t worry. The only thing you need to verify is that you see an orange cloud next to your main domain name (which you should see by default – no action required):

Then, click Continue.

3. Update nameservers to point towards Cloudflare

Now, Cloudflare will give you a new set of nameservers to replace your existing nameservers:

Nameservers are part of what you use to connect your domain name to your web hosting. When you switch to Cloudflare’s nameservers, Cloudflare is able to direct traffic to your website. It uses this power to:

• Filter out malicious traffic – it will send regular traffic to your website just like normal, while filtering out malicious actors before they can reach your site.
• Deliver static content from the closest server in its huge global network (the CDN part)

How you will change your nameservers depends on where you registered your domain name. Here are tutorials for some of the most common domain name registrars:

• GoDaddy
• Namecheap
• OVH
• Bluehost

Here’s what it looks like at Namecheap…

First, here’s how my domain name was configured before connecting it to Cloudflare:

And here’s what it looks like after updating my nameservers to point towards Cloudflare:

Once you’ve changed your domain’s nameservers, go back to the Cloudflare interface and click the Done, check nameservers button.

Note: nameservers can take up to 24 hours to update, so you might need to wait a bit for Cloudflare to update. Don’t panic and think you made a mistake unless it’s been at least 24 hours.

4. Configure some basic settings

On the next page, you can configure some basic settings for how Cloudflare functions.

If you want to use SSL/HTTPS, you should select the Full option. This helps secure traffic at your site and also helps your site get the green padlock in visitors’ browsers.

Make sure to update your WordPress site to use HTTPS if you use Cloudflare’s Full SSL. You’ll likely need to, in part, update your WordPress site’s URLs.

You can also configure:

• Minification – shrink the size of your code. Many WordPress performance plugins enable minification. So if you’re already using a plugin that does that, you shouldn’t enable this in Cloudflare.
• Brotli – Brotli is a server-level compression alternative to Gzip. I recommend enabling it.

Once you’ve made your choices, click Done.

5. Verify that your connection is complete

Once you click Done, you might see a message telling you that you need to complete your nameserver setup:

Again – don’t panic. Nameservers can take up to 24 hours to update, so it’s totally normal to see this message for a few hours even if you did everything correctly.

Wait 30 minutes to an hour and then click the Re-check now button to see if the nameservers have updated.

Once they do, you should see a success message:

And that’s it! You just set up Cloudflare for WordPress.