What Cloudflare is in plain English

Cloudflare sits between your website and the public internet. When someone visits your site, their browser talks to Cloudflare first. Cloudflare then decides whether to serve a cached copy of the page or to pass the request through to your hosting.

When it is set up properly this means:

• Your site loads faster because pages and files are cached close to your visitors.
• Your real hosting is less exposed to random probes, cheap scans, and noisy traffic.
• You get a consistent control panel for DNS instead of juggling several confusing dashboards.

For many small organisations, Cloudflare is the first time anyone has had a clear map of which records point where.

Where Cloudflare helps small organisations

Most small sites sit on shared hosting or run an older WordPress install. They work, but they are often fragile. Problems appear when you get a spike in traffic, a wave of bots, or a plugin update that slows everything down.

Cloudflare can help by:

• Reducing load on your hosting, which cuts the chance of slowdowns and timeouts.
• Filtering obvious junk and suspicious IPs before they reach your origin.
• Giving you basic analytics about requests, countries, and common errors.
• Allowing you to lock down sensitive areas such as WordPress logins with simple rules.

It is not magic, but it moves a lot of risk to the edge, where it is easier to monitor and explain to trustees or directors.

Where Cloudflare is not a magic fix

Cloudflare cannot repair a neglected site. If your hosting is overloaded, your database is broken, or your theme is full of errors, Cloudflare will not make those problems disappear. It can hide some symptoms for a while, which is often worse.

Common examples where Cloudflare is blamed unfairly:

• WordPress plugins fighting with each other and creating slow queries.
• Contact forms that never worked properly in the first place.
• Unreliable hosting that was already timing out before Cloudflare was added.
• Sites that mix insecure content with secure pages, leading to browser warnings.

Cloudflare is powerful, but it expects a reasonable base to work with. It makes a good setup better and a bad setup slightly less painful, for a time.

The most common Cloudflare mistakes

1. Enabling every feature without understanding it

Cloudflare offers a lot of switches and toggles. Web application firewall rules, bot fight modes, under attack mode, page rules, redirect rules, automatic minification, aggressive caching. You do not need most of them on day one.

Turning on everything can:

• Break contact forms or checkout flows.
• Block legitimate visitors or staff working away from the office.
• Hide the real source of errors behind generic error pages.

2. Choosing the wrong SSL mode

For most small sites the safe choice is Full (strict). That means there is a valid certificate on your hosting and Cloudflare also serves traffic over HTTPS. Anything lower creates gaps.

Common issues from the wrong SSL mode include:

• Visitors seeing certificate warnings.
• Content loading partly over HTTP and partly over HTTPS.
• Confusion about where to install certificates in the first place.

3. Leaving DNS half orange and half grey

Cloudflare uses orange and grey clouds in the DNS tab. Orange means traffic goes through Cloudflare. Grey means it does not. If you leave records in a random mix, you lose part of the benefit and create blind spots.

As a rough rule:

• Public facing web traffic usually belongs behind an orange cloud.
• Mail related records must stay grey so they point directly to the right servers.
• Anything used only for internal admin tools should be reviewed before proxying.

4. Forgetting about email when DNS changes

When someone moves DNS into Cloudflare without checking MX, SPF, DKIM, and other records, email is often the first thing to break. Messages start going to spam or bounce entirely. The web still loads, so the problem is not always spotted at once.

5. Relying on Cloudflare instead of maintaining the site

Cloudflare does not remove the need for backups, plugin updates, theme and core updates, or basic security reviews. If your WordPress backend is open to the world with weak passwords, Cloudflare can slow an attacker down, but it cannot save you from every bad decision.

Core Cloudflare settings that actually matter

For most SMEs, charities, and community projects, a small set of well chosen settings goes much further than a complicated setup nobody understands.

• SSL: Full (strict), with a valid certificate on your hosting.
• Security level: Medium, so casual junk is filtered without annoying regular visitors.
• Bot controls: Basic protection on, aggressive bot fight modes only if you have a clear problem.
• Caching: Sensible defaults. Cache static assets for everyone, avoid caching logged in or dynamic pages.
• Firewall rules: A small number of clear rules that you can explain in a sentence each.

Anything more advanced should be written down so that future staff or suppliers know what was done and why.

A simple firewall rule that helps

This example is aimed at a typical UK based WordPress site. It limits access to the login area from outside the UK and Ireland.

(not ip.geoip.country in {"GB" "IE"}) and http.request.uri.path eq "/wp-admin"

In plain language, this means:

• If the visitor is not in the UK or Ireland,
• and they are trying to reach the /wp-admin path,
• then Cloudflare will block or challenge the request, depending on how you set the rule.

This will not stop every possible attack, but it removes a lot of low value noise that comes from botnets scanning the entire internet by habit.

Why logs and visibility matter

One of the most useful parts of Cloudflare is the visibility it gives you. Even on lower plans, you can see patterns in traffic, common paths, and repeated probes. Paired with good hosting logs, this becomes a useful record if you ever face a complaint or internal question.

For some organisations, I go further and build evidence grade logging, where relevant information is retained and summarised in a way you can show to boards, funders, or regulators. That is usually more cost effective than jumping to heavy compliance tools.

You can read more about that in the knowledge hub article on how evidence grade logs change the outcome of a dispute.

How Ki-Ki helps in practice

Many organisations arrive with Cloudflare already switched on by a past supplier or a hosting company. Nobody is quite sure what it does or which logins are still valid. The aim is not to shame whoever set it up. The aim is to get you to a stable, documented state.

• First, I map your domain, DNS, hosting, and any existing Cloudflare zones.
• Then I tidy DNS, SSL, and basic rules so the site behaves consistently.
• Where needed, I introduce simple dashboards and logs so you can see the effect of changes.
• You keep ownership of accounts and logins. Work is written down in clear notes.

If you want to talk through your current setup, you can request a short foundations review.

Request a foundations review Open security and stability deep dive