Last night I gave a short presentation about how to use CloudFlare with WordPress sites to about 60 people attending the WordPress London Meetup. CloudFlare was happy to be sponsor of the event providing drinks, beers and lots and lots of pizza. The meetup was held at the Google Campus.
There were two talks: I was preceded by designer Laura Kalbag who talked about designing icons for WordPress sites. This is something that she made look incredibly easy using a tool called Sketch. I suspect that however good Sketch is, I'd end up drawing icons that looked awful!
My talk was about using WordPress and CloudFlare together. CloudFlare has a ton of features and I highlighted some that are of great interest to WordPress users including the CloudFlare WordPress Plugin and our integration with W3TC.
The other features that people found most interesting were:
- Always Online: CloudFlare crawls the WordPress site and keeps a copy in a special cache. If the original site goes down CloudFlare serves up the most recent version from the crawler cache with a banner indicating that it is old content. This helps keep sites online when things go badly wrong.
- Auto-minify: many WordPress sites have large amount of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (especially if they use lots of plugins). Auto-minify helps shrink those resources so that sites are delivered faster to web browsers.
- Rocket Loader: a tool that reorganizes the loading of resources such as CSS and JavaScript to that they are downloaded to web browsers quickly by bundling them.
- A new, unannounced feature that I'm calling "Help, I've gone viral!" which allows any web site owner to instantly tell CloudFlare to start completely caching a URL (overriding any caching headers set by the site) to cope with load. With this if a URL goes viral and is overloading a WordPress site it's possible to just paste in its URL and ask CloudFlare to take the load of that page. We'll be writing more about that feature when it's released.
And, of course, other CloudFlare features like Easy SSL, SPDY, and IPv6 help everyone get the latest technology onto their site quickly.