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At WPBeginner, we used to use Sucuri for a long time as our website firewall, security, and CDN solution. We recently switched to another firewall and CDN service, Cloudflare.

At WPBeginner, we are transparent about the technologies we use behind the scenes. We have consistently shared that expertise and knowledge with our users for the last 14 years.

In that tradition, we’ll share why we switched from Sucuri to Cloudflare and what performance and security gains we achieved.

What is CDN?

Normally, when a user visits your website, they send their request to your hosting server. It takes more time for users to see your website if they are in a different geographic location.

A CDN service solves this problem by sending static and cached data of your website to the user from a much closer server. This will make your website load faster for all your users.

Reasons Why We Switched from Sucuri to Cloudflare

This means Cloudflare is the nearest server to users’ locations and often the fastest with the lowest latency.

In easier words, Cloudflare is like a fast lane to the internet.

At WPBeginner, our users are from all over the world. Switching to Cloudflare meant reduced latency, faster page loads, and great performance no matter where our users come from.

In comparison, Sucuri has a smaller CDN network with servers spread across strategic locations. It did help speed up website performance, but not as much as Cloudflare, which has more servers across the globe.

Being able to deliver our content to more people, faster, made Cloudflare the obvious choice.

Sucuri vs. Cloudflare – Which Do We Recommend?

Monitoring our website traffic using Google Analytics helps us make data-driven decisions about our business.

However, this data does not include information about DNS requests and their resolutions because website analytics tracking begins after the DNS resolution.

Access to DNS analytics helps us understand DNS requests and queries to our DNS servers. We can also see which requests were blocked, where they originated, and more.

Sucuri simply didn’t provide much of this information. Cloudflare has a handy DNS Analytics dashboard. They also offer an API to the Enterprise users to fetch data from their DNS logs.

Like the granular control of rules, being able to pull DNS logs and monitor requests and queries helps provide the best service we can to WPBeginner users.

1. Faster and Largest CDN Network

This means Cloudflare is the nearest server to users’ locations and often the fastest with the lowest latency.

In easier words, Cloudflare is like a fast lane to the internet.

At WPBeginner, our users are from all over the world. Switching to Cloudflare meant reduced latency, faster page loads, and great performance no matter where our users come from.

In comparison, Sucuri has a smaller CDN network with servers spread across strategic locations. It did help speed up website performance, but not as much as Cloudflare, which has more servers across the globe.

Being able to deliver our content to more people, faster, made Cloudflare the obvious choice.

2. Better Granular Firewall Rules

A website application firewall like Sucuri and Cloudflare automatically detects and blocks malicious attacks at the DNS level.

Larger websites are more frequently targeted by hackers with malicious intent.

Those attacks are sometimes more sophisticated than common DDoS / brute-force attacks.

Because of that, we needed more control over the firewall and attack-blocking rules to combat this.

We are now on the Cloudflare Enterprise plan and have ‘Layer-3 Network DDoS Protection.’ We have access to many pre-made rulesets like Cloudflare WordPress, CF PHP, and more at this level.

We now have extensive options and granular control over what firewall rules we use, which helps us protect and block even larger and more sophisticated attacks before they can reach our servers.

Which Do We Recommend?

Both Sucuri and Cloudflare are great solutions for the security and performance of a WordPress website. We would not have used Sucuri for as long as we did, if it weren’t a solid service.

You can take a look at our detailed comparison of Sucuri vs. Cloudflare for more information.

Which one do we recommend? It depends on your business needs and requirements.

For instance, if you are starting a blog or small business website, Cloudflare free CDN would be a great starting point.

It gives you access to basic website security and CDN network. Even at the free level, this improves your website performance and security.

On the other hand, if you can spend a little or have a limited budget, we will recommend the Sucuri website firewall. They are cheaper than Cloudflare’s more expensive plans and still offer a robust security solution to WordPress users.

Lastly, if your business can support it, we recommend upgrading to a Cloudflare Business or Enterprise plan. It will give your website a significant performance boost with enterprise-grade security and reliability.

We hope this article helped you learn the process behind our decision to switch to Cloudflare. You may also want to see our WPBeginner Insider case study of why we switched from Mailchimp to Drip for email marketing.

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