CDN

Part of my job as a developer is making website hosting recommendations to my clients. To create a list of recommendations, I determine the appropriate plan for the website (or websites) we're working with, and present the options to my client. In order for them to make a decision based on these recommendations, each option needs to include an associated cost.

Since most of my clients are small businesses (with less than 5 employees, in many cases only 1), educational institutions, non-profits, or otherwise operating on a tight budget, they need to know what the cost will be head of time, and they need the ability to reject the recommendation if it is too expensive.

This guide is intended to help people using Cloudflare to speed up and protect their Backdrop CMS sites.

Step #1

Create three Cloudflare PageRules to exclude the Backdrop cron page and the link to run cron as an admin from Cloudflare’s caching and performance features:

• www.example.com/node/*/edit - Cache Level: Bypass
• www.example.com/node/add/* - Cache Level: Bypass
• www.example.com/core/cron.php* - Cache Level: Bypass

Step #2

If you have a valid SSL certificate on your server, you'll need to navigate to the Cloudflare Crypto section and update the SSL setting to `Full (strict)`. Without this setting SSL will be terminated at the Cloudflare edge server, and all traffic on your server will come in through port 80 instead of 443.