Cloudflare Apps got a brand new look and now easy to integrate with the website.
What is Cloudflare Apps?
It’s like an app store where you can explore tools from multiple categories in SEO, Social Media, Conversion, Payment, Security, Images, Ads, Analytics, etc.
You can preview them, and once satisfied with the results, install it. Let’s take one real-time example – if you are running WordPress site and would like to integrate Google Analytics, then you got to install some plugin and manage the configuration. How about implementing Google Analytics at the network edge without installing anything on your website? Sounds cool? Imagine, you can get things done without installing any software on your website.
Why Cloudflare Apps?
Every website needs some additional features like growing the email list, sharing the content, accepting payments, etc. and the traditional way of achieving this is by installing plugin or extensions on your server. These extra plugin/extensions add few bytes to your page and most likely will have some additional CSS & JS files, which will increase the HTTP request. And don’t forget you got to update them whenever a new version is available. So overall, it increases the page size, HTTP request, and maintenance responsibility. Cloudflare apps are a new way of integrating an application to your website.
You don’t have to install anything on your server. You don’t have to bother about upgrading the new version whenever available. You preview the application result before pushing the changes to the live site. Installing or uninstalling an app takes less than a minute. The application is served from users’ nearest location from one of the Cloudflare PoP networks.
Who can use Cloudflare Apps?
Cloudflare apps are available to all Cloudflare users under the “Apps” tab.
How to add Apps?
Adding Cloudflare apps on your website is easy.
Login to Cloudflare Select the site you want to install apps on Go to Apps tab Select the apps you want to install from the list and click on the preview You can see a preview of that app on the right panel (below example of Drift)
Once happy, click on install and you are done! There are some cool apps worth trying.
Live Chat – talk to your potential customer, visitors with Drift, Chatra. Grow social media sharing – Use Facebook like tweet this button, AddToAny, save to Pinterest on a fly. Build a mailing list – looking to generate the leads? Privy, a cover message is there for you. Custom code – no problem, you can use Add HTML/CSS/Content
Cloudflare apps look promising; I like the way you can decouple and offload the resources to Cloudflare to handle at the edge of the network for faster delivery. Most of the apps are free, so go ahead and give a try. If you are still not on Cloudflare, then take a look at some of the advantages I mentioned earlier.
How to Uninstall Cloudflare Apps?
Installed some of the apps accidentally or don’t like it? You can remove them in two easy steps.
Go to Apps tab » Installed Apps. Click on End install the one you wish to remove
It’s great to get things done without installing anything on your server. Isn’t it?
