Member Article

How CloudFlare Is Killing Your Traffic, And How To Prevent It From Doing That

What if I told you that one of your most favorite tools is causing damage to your blog As far-fetched as this sounds if you’re using CloudFlare: you’re probably losing a significant chunk of the traffic you’re receiving.

Cloudflare is pretty trustworthy and does its job well. But what’s the point in having a blog that loads like lightning but kicks its users out? (not quite literally)

There’s a certain feature in Cloudflare which blacklists your website/blog. This leads to your readers having to fill in a captcha to access a site. A reader is under no obligation to do so and in all probability won’t type the captcha. Guess what? You just lost a valuable member of your audience. Why don’t we try and contemplate the scale of traffic that all of us are losing?

How CloudFlare Is Killing Your Traffic, And How To Prevent It From Doing That

CloudFlare is free and used by a limited size of the blogosphere (At least, the bloggers who blog about blogging, SEO, etc.)

The silver lining is that you can fix this with a small tweak, all is not lost (yet).

Show me the magic!

• Log on to cloudfare.com and log in to your account.
• Go to the firewall tab.
• Under security level, change low to necessarily low.
• Bingo. You’re not going to lose any traffic because of some silly security feature now.

Sigh! (of relief) What next?

Cloudflare is probably going to come under a lot of fire for this. You should know that it’s not their fault and that they had this mechanism in place to avoid actual security conflicts (add whatever the real reason was since I don’t know) Cloudflare is still the best in business at what they do, and I commend them. They should look into this issue though since a lot of unaware bloggers are losing some serious traffic over this.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Seema Sharma .