If you run a real business online, site speed is not a nice-to-have. It is infrastructure. Slow pages lose rankings, lose clicks, and lose revenue. Cloudflare sits in front of our WordPress sites and handles the heavy lifting: faster delivery, lower hosting bills, and a security layer we never want to be without.
In this post, I will walk through how we use Cloudflare on our own properties, what it costs us at scale, and the exact setup steps that take less than 20 minutes. If you
Updated 2026.
I am a long-time Cloudflare customer. I am enough of a believer that I am also a shareholder. That is how much confidence I have in the company and its products. Last year, my personal WordPress websites reached over 11 million people. We paid Cloudflare $4,341.58 for the entire year. I will say it plainly: if you have a real business earning real
95% of Lasso customers pay less than $100/year. Our customers with fast sites earn more
1What is Lasso?
We build tools for operators who
Lasso: The All-In-One WordPress Plugin for Affiliate Marketing
A WordPress plugin that lets you add, manage, and display your affiliate links from any program, including Amazon. Increase conversions. Find new affiliate link opportunities. Earn more revenue! Less than 5 minutes to set up.
2Why Use Cloudflare?
One of the biggest drivers of conversion is site speed. Google treats it as a core ranking factor. For our customers to succeed, they need to be fast. That is why we recommend Cloudflare across the board.
In this article, I will cover:
- How much
money you can save on hosting costs by using Cloudflare. - How fast Cloudflare makes a WordPress site in practice.
- Where our $4,341.58 in Cloudflare spend went and how to estimate your own bill.
- The three tools we use for speed on top of Cloudflare.
Speed and monetization are linked. We have written about this pattern before. A faster site with better product displays and a secondary CTA can compound small gains into real revenue. If you want the conversion side of the equation, read our post on using a secondary CTA to improve conversion rates.
Hosting Cost Savings
Do you know who I pay even less than Cloudflare? My WordPress hosting company. In 2020, we only paid
Based on
If you are on a less powerful host, Cloudflare is an easy way to boost site speed without upgrading your hosting plan. For a deeper walkthrough on WordPress performance, see our guide on how to speed up your WordPress site.
What is a CDN?
To understand why hosting costs drop, you need to know what a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is. A CDN sits between your visitors and your website, storing copies of your pages and assets. It serves those copies faster than your origin server could on its own.
Because the CDN stores your HTML and images, your hosting server does almost zero actual work. In plain English, your website server barely sees traffic. The CDN absorbs it. In our case, that CDN is Cloudflare.
Benefits of Cloudflare
Cloudflare runs many data centers that serve your site’s pages instead of routing every request to a single server at your host. Their CDN is proximity-focused, so your site is served from the data center closest to each visitor. If your site is big enough, it can be served from every one of those locations.
Cloudflare’s CDN network serves over 25 million requests per second. Your traffic is a drop in that ocean. That scale is the point. You get enterprise-grade delivery without enterprise-grade hosting bills.
If you want serious speed that just works, this is what you’ve been looking for. Their performance and bang-for-your-buck are unparalleled. They also deliver a ton of value on their free tier.
We don’t earn anything recommending Cloudflare. That’s how great we think it is.
3Getting Started with Cloudflare
How do you access all of this? It is straightforward. Plan on less than 20 minutes end to end. Here is the sequence we use on our sites.
Sign Up for a Cloudflare Account
Start by creating an account, which defaults to their free plan. Cloudflare’s performance and value are unmatched at every tier. Their onboarding walks you through setting up your domain’s DNS. Budget about 15 minutes.
Why care about DNS? DNS settings are the plumbing behind how someone types a domain into a browser and reaches your site. Faster DNS means visitors experience your content sooner.
Enable Caching
In your Cloudflare dashboard, click the button on your domain to make the cloud icon orange and show “Proxied.” That enables Cloudflare’s CDN. You also get automatic DDoS protection, so a traffic spike does not take your site offline.
Install the Cloudflare WordPress Plugin
Caching can be tricky on WordPress. The official Cloudflare plugin simplifies it. Setup takes about 15 minutes and pushes your cache hit rate close to 100%.
Read more about Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) feature in their excellent article. APO integrates with WordPress so every time you update a page, Cloudflare purges the cache for that URL automatically.
Lossless Image Optimization
Images are often the biggest load-time culprit on content sites. Cloudflare reduces image delivery time without you rebuilding every asset by hand. Turn on the relevant settings in the Speed section of your dashboard. Every image that passes through your domain gets faster.
For additional compression inside WordPress, we also use Imagify on some properties. It handles formatting automatically so we do not spend hours in an image editor.
If you want serious speed that just works, this is what you’ve been looking for. Their performance and bang-for-your-buck are unparalleled. They also deliver a ton of value on their free tier.
We don’t earn anything recommending Cloudflare. That’s how great we think it is.
Enable Argo
Argo uses machine learning to find the best path from a visitor’s browser to your website. It can reduce response time significantly on high-traffic sites. Turn it on once caching and APO are dialed in.
4The Three Tools We Use for Speed
Cloudflare is the foundation. On top of it, we run a small stack of tools that handle the WordPress-specific work Cloudflare does not own.
Cloudflare handles CDN delivery, DNS, DDoS protection, image optimization at the edge, and Argo routing. It is the layer that makes our hosting bill irrelevant at scale.
WP Rocket handles caching and lazy loading inside WordPress. We use it specifically for image lazy loading on posts with heavy media. It is recognized as one of the most powerful caching plugins for WordPress.
3.6
Make your site load faster in a few clicks. WP Rocket is recognized as one of the most powerful caching plugins for WordPress. We use it specifically for image lazy loading.
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Imagify compresses images on upload so pages stay lean before they ever hit the CDN. Instead of manually formatting every image, it optimizes them automatically.
That is the full stack: Cloudflare at the edge, WP Rocket in WordPress, Imagify on assets. None of these replace the others. They stack.
If you want a broader checklist beyond this setup, our post on optimizing site speed covers additional wins across hosting, plugins, and content structure.
5Conclusion
Cloudflare offers speed and efficiency that plugins like WP Rocket cannot match on their own. With Cloudflare, you get the power of a global network in front of whatever host you already pay for. Pair that with smart monetization on the page and you are operating like a business, not a hobby site.
Once your infrastructure is fast, the next bottleneck is usually revenue per visitor. Run an Opportunities Scan with Lasso to find unmonetized mentions, broken links, and product names sitting in your archives without affiliate URLs attached. Most operators find quick wins on the first pass.
Need expert help? We are here for our customers. We have deep experience growing large affiliate businesses. If you have questions about Cloudflare’s performance benefits or want a second set of eyes on your stack, message us. We are happy to help.
Ready to improve how your site earns? Start with Lasso and build displays that convert on the fast pages Cloudflare delivers.
Imagify speeds up your website with image compression, so your pages load faster. Instead of taking the time to format your images, they optimize them automatically.
Andrew Fiebert
Andrew is a thirty-something father of twins, a self-professed data nerd and founder of Lasso. He's spent the past 10+ years building affiliate businesses. Andrew has a B.S. in Computer Science and has been featured in Quartz, Forbes, Business Insider,…