Visitors leave slow websites quickly, and a small site hosted on one server can feel slow to visitors on the other side of the world even when it feels fast to you. A content delivery network fixes this by caching your site's static files on servers near each visitor, so images, stylesheets, and scripts load from nearby instead of crossing an ocean. Cloudflare's free plan gives a small site a real CDN, plus free SSL and basic protection, for nothing.

This guide walks through the setup in plain terms, explains what to cache and what not to cache, and names the free plan's limits honestly, so you can decide whether it fits your site.