Most of the bloggers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises use WordPress for their websites. WordPress being a popular CMS choice, is easy to build and maintain. However, it does have some hackles of coding and choosing plugins when it comes to optimizing the website's performance.

What if we had a user-friendly interface and minimal learning curve to provide excellent WordPress website performance? That would take off a lot of load from our shoulders, right?!

What are Cloudflare Workers?

Cloudflare is a well known CDN (Content Delivery Network) with servers placed in different geo-locations across the world, which help render static web pages from the closest server to the requester. They also have a reputation for DNS (Domain Name Server) and SSL services.

Cloudflare Workers is a Javascript execution environment that is serverless (you'll know what serverless means in a bit), which helps you build applications without having to worry about deployment of the application.

The two main paradigms that you'll come across in Cloudflare Workers are serverless computing and edge computing.

When we say serverless, we don't mean that the developers are devoid of a server. Instead, the developers are not aware of the physical server, and they needn't worry about the server's infrastructure. This setup helps in utilizing time to concentrate on writing quality codes rather than worry about server configurations.

Another aspect is edge computing, which helps you decentralize your resources, such as computing power and data storage. In Cloudflare Workers, we can see both these technologies, which help render far more efficient applications and websites.

Furthermore, Cloudflare Workers initially supported Javascript as their server-side language. Now, they support many other languages like Python, Scala, Kotlin, Reason, and Dart. Also, it runs on the V8 execution environment, which is an open-source javascript engine by google.

Why Choose Cloudflare?

Some of the reasons why Cloudflare is a great solution would be:

• Low investments and higher ROIs: Cloudflare is predominantly FaaS (Function as a Service), where you use the platform only to write code. And Cloudflare takes care of hosting and deployment, which means you only place static files in their cloud network and pay for only what you use. We'll see their pricing plans in the coming sections.
• Scalability, Performance, and Reliability: Cloudflare is a CDN. Its network nodes spread across 171 locations, giving it an edge over a website without CDN in terms of security and performance, making it a reliable choice. Because we’re rendering static files over a distributed network, it amplifies the website’s performance. Since it's a cloud infrastructure, you can always scale up according to business needs.

How Does Cloudflare Workers Work with WordPress?

Now that we have an idea about Cloudflare Workers and its advantages, we'll see how it works with WordPress. The most basic functionalities that have to be incorporated into a well-performing WordPress website would be the following:

1. Optimizing response time of the website.
2. Securing the website.
3. Providing hotlink protection
4. Optimizing images
5. Using a CDN
6. Good SEO ranking
7. Rate limiting
8. Minify HTML, CSS, JS pages

These were some of the factors that our WordPress website needs. How does Cloudflare help us achieve this? Let’s find out.

• Security: Cloudflare provides a free SSL, manipulates HTTP requests to HTTPS, provides SSL encryption levels, the built-in firewall creates firewall rules for sensitive pages like the WordPress admin page of your website.
• Minification: Cloudflare helps you optimize your images with a built-in feature called polish. It also enables you to minify your web pages using Railgun, thereby optimizing your website’s performance.
• Cloudflare as a CDN: As a CDN, Cloudflare helps in keeping your website up always. Increases response time, providing a more fabulous user experience.
• SEO: Since Cloudflare provides cached web pages, it is possible to think that it might affect your SEO rankings. However, you don't face any SEO backlash.
• Rate Limiting: Cloudflare can prevent spammers from crawling your website, which results in consuming the bandwidth.
• DNS: Cloudflare is the world's fastest DNS provider, and they also follow DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) specification.
• Hotlinking media and streaming: You can prevent hotlinking of any media hosted on your website using Cloudflare’s built-in options. They also have a feature to stream high-quality videos using the Cloudflare stream.

How to Implement Cloudflare Workers with WordPress?

We’ll now see how to implement the above-said Cloudflare features into our WordPress website practically.

We can integrate Cloudflare workers in two ways. Either we can deploy our entire WordPress website as static files into the CDN or use certain features on a need basis.

Deploy your entire website using Cloudflare Workers:

This can be done in a few easy steps as below:

1. Create a free Cloudflare account. At this point, you will be able to choose a pricing plan as well.

2. After you have created your account, you will have to update your nameservers to point to Cloudflare.

3. Configure some basic settings like SSL/HTTPS and minification options on the Cloudflare portal.

4. You can now verify if the connection is successful. That's it. Your website is integrated with Cloudflare and comes with the benefits of it. You can manage Cloudflare on your WordPress website with their official plugin. You will have to log in to your Cloudflare account, and then you will have a dashboard with Cloudflare options to manage from.

Use Cloudflare’s Specific Workers for Specific Requirements.

We had listed the various functionalities that we can have with the integration of Cloudflare Workers and WordPress. If you don’t want to deploy your entire site, and want to incorporate some of the features you need, you can do that too!

Some of the Cloudflare Workers examples are:

• Image Optimization using Cloudflare Workers: This Worker will help you resize, crop, compress, and convert your source images into WebP.
• Improving HTML TTFB (Time To First Byte): TTFB is a measure of time from when a web page is requested to the time the first byte of the page is served. TTFB measures the web responsiveness of your server; it can be improved using Cloudflare Worker.
• Extract cookie value: The cookie extractor Worker will intercept the request made to your website and add the cookie based on the parameters in the URL. These cookies can be helpful for many reasons based on your business cases. For example, you want to know where your user is coming from or knowing your user's preferences better. The difference with using Cloudflare’s cookie worker is that you can apply it to static pages without modifying server code.

They have all their code in GitHub and documentation for Cloudflare Workers examples. You can refer to them for more information. After you have finished writing your code, you can also test them in their integrated playground.

Conclusion

As we have come to the end of the article, we have noticed significantly less coding involved in this process. All the code we need is already available, and we should know the right place to add it. On this note, we'd like to conclude saying that you needn't be a developer to work with Cloudflare Workers. It would help if you had a basic understanding of Cloudflare Workers and how it works, which we hope this article has provided. And that's it! You're good to go. To learn more about what they have to offer, read their tutorials and documentation, and practice on the playground.