{"id":1134068,"date":"2019-04-16T11:00:23","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T09:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/?p=1134068"},"modified":"2021-07-29T09:42:10","modified_gmt":"2021-07-29T07:42:10","slug":"cloudflare-vs-cloudfront","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp-rocket.me\/blog\/cloudflare-vs-cloudfront\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloudflare vs CloudFront: How They Work, Plus Which is Best For You"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is about clouds. No – not the fluffy kind in the sky. Two specific types of clouds – Cloudflare vs CloudFront.
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At a basic level, both of these tools aim to speed up your website for global visitors by storing your static content at lots of different servers around the world. If you’re not familiar, the term for this is “content delivery network<\/a>” (or CDN).
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However, while Cloudflare and CloudFront share the same goal, they go about it in different ways and also have slightly different feature sets.
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In this post, I’ll compare Cloudflare vs Amazon CloudFront to help you pick the solution that’s right for your WordPress site.
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Side note – you can use WP Rocket with either Cloudflare or CloudFront, so you’ll be covered no matter which one you pick!<\/em><\/p>

Cloudflare vs CloudFront: The Basic Differences<\/h2>

Ok, so both Cloudflare and CloudFront are CDNs. However, beyond that, there’s a big difference in how they function.<\/p>

Cloudflare Explained<\/h3>
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Cloudflare<\/a> is actually a reverse proxy<\/strong>. In part, that means that, when you set up your site with Cloudflare, you’ll actually point your domain’s nameservers to Cloudflare.
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Then, Cloudflare will direct all the traffic to your site<\/a>. This gives Cloudflare a lot of control over your site, and this is also what allows Cloudflare to offer extra functionality beyond<\/em> its CDN (more on this in a second<\/em>).
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Here’s the process in a little more detail:<\/p>

When someone visits your site, Cloudflare will take your static content and store your content on Cloudflare’s network of servers around the world. Then, for future visitors, Cloudflare can serve up that cached static content from the Cloudflare edge server that’s nearest to each visitor.
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Because of how this approach works, all of your content will still load from yoursite.com<\/strong>. This is different from how a lot of other CDNs work, where it’s common to serve your content from a separate URL like cdn.yoursite.com<\/strong>.
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Beyond its CDN functionality, Cloudflare also has a number of other benefits on its free<\/strong> plan including:<\/p>