The Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a way to serve your website’s content to visitors across the globe. Your WordPress.com website uses our built-in CDN by default, but you may connect to the Cloudflare CDN as an alternative by following the steps in this guide.
This feature is available on sites with our WordPress.com Starter, Explorer, Creator, and Entrepreneur plans, and the legacy Pro plan. For sites on the free plan, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
In this guide
Cloudflare provides services to optimize a WordPress website that WordPress.com site owners can take advantage of.
Keep in mind that many features offered by Cloudflare are already built into WordPress.com plans, including speed optimization, caching, web analytics, security, SSL, and CDN.
The CDN feature described in this guide is a free service from Cloudflare. Cloudflare offers additional services and upgrade options that require your website to have a plugin-enabled plan.
To use the Cloudflare CDN on your WordPress.com site, take the following steps:
- Visit your website’s dashboard on WordPress.com.
- Navigate to Settings → Performance.
- Scroll down to the “Cloudflare CDN” section.
- Click on the “Learn more” link or visit the Cloudflare sign-up page here.
- Click the “Get Started” button on the Cloudflare website, and you will be prompted to create your account.
- In your new account’s dashboard, Cloudflare will ask for your site address. Enter your WordPress.com website’s domain name here (free site addresses ending in
.wordpress.comandwpcomstaging.comare not accepted.)
Continue through the steps on Cloudflare, where you will be prompted to choose a Cloudflare plan.
Cloudflare requires your website’s domain to use Cloudflare name servers. Configure your name servers as follows:
- Visit your WordPress.com site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Upgrades → Domains (or Hosting → Domains in WP-Admin) and select the domain you want to edit.
- Select “Name Servers“.
- Disable the “Use WordPress.com name servers” option.
- In the boxes provided, enter the name servers that are provided by Cloudflare. These will replace the WordPress.com name servers.
- Click the “Save custom name servers” button.
- Log into your account on your domain provider’s website.
- Locate the setting to change the domain’s name servers. Your provider’s support service may be able to assist you here.
- Enter the name servers that are provided by Cloudflare.
- Save your changes.
The changes to your name servers can take up to 72 hours to become active but typically take only a few hours.
After that, your Cloudflare setup on WordPress.com is complete. You can return to Cloudflare to configure the remaining features of their CDN service.
In some cases, you may have a conflict between Jetpack and Cloudflare. While Jetpack cannot be disabled on WordPress.com-hosted sites, Cloudflare offers instructions for ensuring that Jetpack continues to work with your Cloudflare setup.
If you are getting an SSL error with a Cloudflare-managed domain, disable the Cloudflare SSL setting temporarily so that we (WordPress.com) can provision the LetsEncrypt SSL.
If you get a 301 Redirect Error when sharing to Facebook, you can troubleshoot this error by checking your settings under “SSL/TLS” → “Edge Certificates”. Ensure the “Always Use HTTPS” and “Automatic HTTPS rewrite” are turned off here.
If you run into any difficulty with connecting Cloudflare to your site, please contact WordPress.com support.
For questions about Cloudflare’s services, you can visit the Cloudflare support site.
