Gain More Control of Your WordPress Site with Cloudflare Enterprise
As your business grows, so will the demands of your website. You may begin to notice an increase in traffic and a need for better performance, speed, and security.
Ultimately, we at BigScoots aim to help you get there so you can better serve your customers.
In a recent article, we discussed how BigScoots uses WordPress on Cloudflare to drive optimal performance and security – a must for growing websites.
In this article, we’re going to share the story of how BigScoots began working with Cloudflare. We will explore how we use our expertise in Cloudflare Hosting to build custom Cloudflare Enterprise tools for our clients, and how all of this delivers a variety of strengths and benefits to our clients today.
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The Beginning of a Decade-Long History With Cloudflare Enterprise
As a pioneer of Cloudflare for WordPress, BigScoots has come a long way since it started in 2010.
In order to deliver the best performance for our clients’ websites, BigScoots was one of the first web hosting providers to adopt Cloudflare early in the game. We did so to stay committed to providing exceptional services and options to our clients.
Our clients deserve the very best, and Cloudflare’s content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity and DDoS mitigation were unmatched.
Some of our more established clients had more extensive demands: faster websites, better security and accelerated edge caching. To meet the demands, we knew Cloudflare Enterprise had to be the next step in our offerings.
At the time, Cloudflare Enterprise was very new to the web hosting space. As a pioneer in adopting Cloudflare Enterprise, we worked with Cloudflare to develop many systems and processes for our clients, going through a lot of R&D and testing phases to ensure they worked seamlessly.
The initial phase was creating, rolling out, and then improving and perfecting Cloudflare Enterprise to work alongside our technologies. That gave rise to the BigScoots Caching Plugin that supports a wide gamut of websites, small and large.
After months of testing and development, we were ready to go live with Cloudflare and offered Cloudflare Enterprise as part of our WordPress Speed Optimization services. The idea was to give our clients the power needed to boost their Core Web Vitals (CWV) and the overall security of their sites.
The Need for Custom Cloudflare Enterprise Settings
Eventually, our clients started to request changes to their Cloudflare Enterprise settings. Unfortunately, changes could only be done manually by our support team. Clients would have to open a ticket and work with our team to update and make changes to their Cloudflare Enterprise account.
Our tech-savvy clients wanted the ability to make the changes they needed, and when they needed. They wanted to adjust their settings without the need to continuously submit support tickets to BigScoots.
Initially, we wanted to allow them to manage specific aspects of their site, as they requested. However, achieving this is easier said than done.
A single Cloudflare Enterprise account can service thousands of customers with critical websites, making it impossible and unfeasible to grant complete access to individual users.
This made it extremely challenging to allow users to change their settings freely. One feature desired by a client might not be desirable to another.
That showed us that we needed a dynamic and adjustable system on a client-by-client basis. Our commitment was (and always will be) to provide our clients with the best service, so it was a no-brainer that we would have to further develop Cloudflare Enterprise controls for Managed WordPress hosting clients.
How BigScoots Gives Clients Control Over Cloudflare Enterprise for WordPress
BigScoots observed that other providers were adding customizable Cloudflare Enterprise settings to their services that allowed users to tweak, fine-tune, or enable specific options. Yet, there was still room for improvement.
As BigScoots looks to be one step ahead of the competition, we made a conscious decision to develop Cloudflare Enterprise settings that offer significantly more customization options than any other provider in the market.
Our BigScoots team of Cloudflare-certified engineers got to work. They used their deep understanding of Cloudflare’s capabilities to develop exclusive Cloudflare tools and services that give clients more control over their hosted content online.
“Our team is incredibly focused on feedback from clients and partners when it comes to the usability and the feature sets of our platform. When we learned that access to Cloudflare Enterprise settings was important to clients and that it is not readily available from other hosting providers, we knew we had to lead the way and build this.”
Saumya Majumder, Lead Software Development Engineer at BigScoots
We leveraged cutting-edge software to build systems that can scale and easily allow for the development of new features our clients requested.
At one point, BigScoots was approached by a few of our customers who opened up a ticket asking us to block traffic from AI bots, etc. Rather than merely resolve that one issue, we developed and rolled out a feature – in less than a week – that allowed clients to “choose” the types of bots they wanted blocked from their domain all on their own.
This setting was well received by our clients, so we continued to develop and integrate additional, customizable Cloudflare Enterprise settings into the BigScoots WordPress Optimized (WPO) Client Portal.
Today, these settings are live for all our clients within the WordPress Speed Optimization package and Enterprise WordPress Hosting services.
What You Get with Customizable Enterprise Cloudflare Settings for WordPress
With customizable Enterprise Cloudflare Settings, you get significantly greater controls and tools than any other hosting provider to fine-tune your Cloudflare Enterprise operations, such as:
- Advanced Content Delivery Network (CDN) Cache: CDN page caching is one of the critical pillars of site performance. It supports the transfer of internet content, including HTML pages, JavaScript files, style sheets, images and videos. The Enterprise Cloudflare controls allow clients to customize their own settings around CDN Page Caching, Cache by Device Type and even Cache by Country.
- Speed Optimization: The Enterprise Cloudflare controls allow clients to choose their own settings around Font Optimization, Early Hints, Rocket Loader, and more.
- Advanced Security: The Cloudflare Enterprise controls page allows clients to adjust their settings around advanced WAF security additions, Security Sensitivity, Email Obfuscation, and more.
Enterprise Cloudflare Analytics Dashboards by BigScoots
To help clients understand and measure the impact of their custom Cloudflare Enterprise settings, BigScoots developed and integrated an exclusive Cloudflare Analytics Dashboards into the WPO Client Portal to give clients more access and transparency to their performance data.
“BigScoots was one of the first hosting providers to adopt Cloudflare’s managed DNS and CDN services to improve web page caching for our Managed WordPress Hosting services. But rather than rest on our laurels, our engineering team continues to innovate so that our clients have continued access to the most powerful and comprehensive Cloudflare advantages possible.“
Justin Catello, Lead Systems Engineer and Co-Founder of BigScoots
The Cloudflare Analytics dashboards include:
- Traffic Analytics that provide deep insights into individual server requests, bot verifications, page and visit metrics, API requests, and more.
- Caching Analytics that provide deep insights into data transfers, cache status, hit ratios, requests by sources (such as content types, source types, edge status codes, etc), and more.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) Analytics that provide deep insights into WAF events, events by service, activity logs, and more.
The data gained through the Dashboard provides valuable insights that our clients can use to adjust their hosting needs as desired.
Enhance Your WordPress Site with Cloudflare Enterprise at BigScoots
Whether you access Enterprise Cloudflare through our WordPress Speed Optimization service or with an Enterprise WordPress Hosting service, Enterprise Cloudflare delivers unmatched performance, security, and service for all your needs.
We encourage you to experience the power of BigScoots alongside Enterprise Cloudflare for yourself. Seeing the results first-hand is the best way to realize why we recommend it over any other alternatives.
BigScoots will take care of the entire setup, management and the adminstrative process, so you can kick back and relax as we take care of everything on the back end.
Ready to get Enterprise Cloudflare to enhance your website’s performance and security? Chat with our team to get started!
