Cloudflare Free Tier: 5 Settings Every Small Business Site Needs

Most small business sites sit directly on the open internet with no cache, no firewall, and HTTP still half-enabled. Cloudflare free plan fixes all three in about 20 minutes — CDN, DNS and firewall in front of your site.

1. Proxy everything, then enforce HTTPS

• Set DNS records to Proxied (orange cloud) so traffic passes through Cloudflare edge.
• SSL/TLS › Full (Strict) + Always Use HTTPS + HSTS. Kills mixed-content warnings.

2. Cache static assets aggressively

• Caching › Configuration: Cache Level Standard, Browser TTL 4 hours, Edge TTL a month for images/CSS/JS.
• Add Cache Rule: /images/*, *.css, *.js → Cache Everything, Edge TTL 30 days. Purge on deploy.

3. Turn on Auto Minify + Brotli + Early Hints

Speed › Optimization: enable Auto Minify (JS/CSS/HTML), Brotli, Early Hints and HTTP/3. Typically 20-40% smaller pages with zero code changes.

4. Two firewall rules that block 90% of junk

• Security › WAF: enable Managed Ruleset (free).
• Security › Bots: Bot Fight Mode ON. Rate rule: same IP > 30 req / 10s to /contact or /wp-login.php → Managed Challenge.

Free CDN + forced HTTPS + two firewall rules beats most paid security plugins.

5. Verify and monitor

Check cf-cache-status: HIT on repeat loads, run PageSpeed before/after, turn on uptime alerts. Add domain to Search Console same day.

How Uphill Tech helps

We put every client site behind Cloudflare with these defaults, plus fast static sites where cache HIT rates stay near 100%. First conversation is free.