Cloudflare recently published a 2022 Year in Review, which got us thinking. Many of our clients use our Secure Web Accelerator powered by Cloudflare products but don’t fully understand the incredible performance and security benefits it provides. We’d like to change that. One of our favorite things about Cloudflare is that it is data-driven. Millions of Internet properties are on Cloudflare’s global network, which gives Cloudflare access to data trends and intelligence to continuously improve their service and share that information with users like you and me. If you love looking at the data and want to see real-world case studies around website traffic, adoption, and security, this article is for you. We combed through Cloudflare’s 2022 insights to share the 3 biggest takeaways you need to know going into the new year.
1. Bot Traffic
Did you know that ⅓ of traffic on the internet comes from bots? There are all kinds of bots on the Internet. Some are helpful, but many are malicious. There are bots that steal sensitive information, take over accounts, spam, and more. An undetected bot can create a bad customer experience, damage your brand, and negatively impact your revenue.
Cloudflare observed the following bot traffic volumes throughout 2022.
When you join Cloudflare’s global network, you automatically get bot mitigation. Cloudflare harnesses all of the data from the millions of websites that run on Cloudflare to classify bots as good or bad and manage them accordingly. Cloudflare will allow good bots to reach your site while preventing malicious traffic and instantly deploying protection against bot attacks.
2. Mobile Adoption
Mobile devices are everywhere, and they go everywhere with us. In the United States, it is common for people to own a mobile phone, a tablet, and a laptop or desktop. In other parts of the world, mobile usage is much higher.
Depending on where your customers live, you may want to consider how important it is to invest in ensuring your website offers a seamless mobile experience. Cloudflare tracked mobile device usage worldwide in 2022, with Africa and the Middle East dominating the top 10 list.
Google considers mobile performance to be very important, which is why it introduced a set of performance metrics called Google Core Web Vitals. Optimizing these metrics for mobile devices can help improve the performance of a website and potentially lead to higher search rankings. Additionally, Google also uses mobile-first indexing, which means that it is more likely to use the mobile version of a website as the primary version for indexing and ranking.
Mobile devices typically have CPU, memory, power, and network speeds than desktops, which negatively affects mobile performance. Cloudflare addresses these challenges by optimizing image files for mobile and providing tools to improve the user experience for mobile clients.
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3. Website Security
Protecting your website is a 24/7 job. Cybercrime never sleeps, and there is always a cybercriminal willing to test out a new type of attack. Cyber attacks can take a high-traffic website down for hours and steal customer data. It seems like almost every week, customers receive a notification from high-profile trustworthy brands about a data breach or unexpected outage. No one is safe, and no single solution can completely eliminate the threat of malicious website traffic. It’s best practice to implement a solution to help you do it all.
Cloudflare is a leader in this area. Some of the ways Cloudflare mitigates malicious web traffic include:
All Internet properties on Cloudflare are shielded by the best DDoS protection service that helps to absorb and block distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Cloudflare web application firewall (WAF) monitors and filters incoming traffic to a website, blocking malicious requests and protecting the website from common attacks.
Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN) distributes traffic across multiple servers worldwide, making it difficult for attackers to focus their efforts on a single entry point. Every server across their 275 network locations runs the full stack of DDoS mitigation services to defend against the largest attacks.
Cloudflare’s real-time monitoring of website traffic and logs, along with security analytics, can help you detect abnormal or suspicious activity, such as a sudden increase in traffic from a specific IP address or location. Cloudflare allows you to block specific IP addresses or entire countries from accessing your website.
Cloudflare recorded the percentage of attacks mitigated by each security solution in 2022. DDoS mitigation and web application firewalls were the two most effective defenses against attacks, mitigating over 90% of traffic.
By making Cloudflare’s network your security perimeter with Secure Web Accelerator, you gain many of the benefits listed above automatically. If you want to manage your security settings from a single console, we recommend the Plus or Pro plans. This will give you access to the Cloudflare dashboard, which offers security feature customizations and analytics.
