Ecommerce websites on Cloudflare: best practices

Cloudflare provides numerous benefits to ecommerce sites, including advanced DDOS protection and an industry-leading Web Application Firewall (WAF) that helps secure your transactions and protect customers’ private data.

A key Cloudflare feature is caching, which allows content to be served closer to the end user from our global network of data centers. Doing so improves the user's shopping experience and contributes to increasing the proportion of people completing a purchase (conversion rate).

For example:

• Walmart found improving page load time by 1 second increased their conversion rate by 2%
• Research for Amazon showed every 0.1 second of delay costs 1% of sales
• The Barack Obama campaign website saw an 80% page load time boost resulted in a 14% increase in donations

What is caching?

Cloudflare operates over 110 data centers around the world. When a website implements Cloudflare, visitor requests for the site will proxy through the nearest Cloudflare data center instead of connecting directly to the webserver hosting the site (origin). This means Cloudflare can store content such as images, JavaScript, CSS and HTML on our servers, speeding up access to those resources for end-users.

Most ecommerce websites rely on a backend database containing product descriptions and metadata Continue reading