What Is Cloudflare Railgun™? Improve WordPress Speed 100%

What Is Cloudflare Railgun™?

1. What is Railgun?

Railgun is a WAN optimization technology. CloudFlare’s Railgun technology greatly speeds up the delivery of non-cached pages. Although Cloudflare automatically caches 65% of the resources required to make up a page, 35% can’t be cached mainly because the resources are dynamically generated or marked as ‘do not cache. That 35% is often the initial HTML of the page that must be downloaded first. Cloudflare Railgun speeds this remaining 35%.

2. What are the benefits of Railgun?

Sites running Railgun show a 143% improvement in HTML load times and a 90% decrease in Time To First Byte (TTFB) responses.

Cloudflare’s Railgun technology is designed to speed up content delivery to users. It compresses and caches web page resources and then delivers them to users over a secure network. Railgun is available to all Cloudflare customers at no additional charge.

Cloudflare’s Railgun technology is based on the WAN optimization technique known as compression. It works by reducing the size of web page resources, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files so that they can be transferred faster over the network. Railgun uses a proprietary compression algorithm that is up to 99.6% effective.

In addition to compressing web page resources, Railgun also caches them. When a user requests a web page, the resources are retrieved from the cache rather than from the origin server. This can further speed up the delivery of content and reduce the load on the origin server.

Railgun is available to all Cloudflare customers at no additional charge. It is enabled by default for all website resources, and there is no need to change your website’s code.

Railgun is an essential part of Cloudflare’s performance optimization stack. It is one of the critical technologies we use to deliver our promise of a faster Internet for everyone.

3. How does Cloudflare Railgun work?

Railgun opens a secure, tunneled connection between the CloudFlare network and your host’s origin server where the connection only sends differences from the last request. This is similar to how video encoding works.

Cloudflare’s Railgun technology is designed to speed up content delivery from Cloudflare’s network to end users. Railgun accelerates the loading of non-cached content on a website by reducing the time it takes to establish a connection between Cloudflare’s network and the origin server and compressing the data transferred between the two.

When a user attempts to load a page that Cloudflare does not cache, the process of loading the page can be slowed down by the time it takes to establish a connection between Cloudflare’s network and the origin server. Railgun reduces this time by using a technique called TCP multiplexing. TCP multiplexing allows Cloudflare to open a single connection to the origin server and send multiple requests for content over that connection. This reduces the latency that can be caused by the process of opening and closing multiple connections.

In addition to TCP multiplexing, Railgun uses a compression algorithm to compress the data transferred between Cloudflare’s network and the origin server. This compression can reduce the time it takes to load a page by up to 70%.

Railgun is designed to work with any origin server and does not require any changes to be made to the origin server. Railgun is available to all Cloudflare customers at no additional charge.

4. What kind of sites can use Cloudflare Railgun?

So, what kind of sites can use Cloudflare Railgun? Any site that has dynamic content can benefit from using Railgun. This includes everything from simple websites updating their content regularly to complex applications that need to load new data quickly. If your site is powered by a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal, Railgun can help speed up your content delivery to users.

Any site that would benefit from faster dynamic content delivery can use Cloudflare Railgun. So if you’re looking for a way to speed up your website or application, Railgun is worth considering.

5. How much does Cloudflare Railgun cost?

Railgun is available to Cloudflare customers on the paid Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Pricing for Railgun is based on the size of the site, with discounts for more significant sites. For example, a site with 1 million page views per month would pay $200/month for Railgun, while a site with 10 million pageviews would pay $1000/month.

Cloudflare’s Railgun is a web optimization technology that speeds up the delivery of content to users. It uses a TCP connection to compress and cache content as it is transferred between the origin server and Cloudflare’s data center. Railgun is available to Cloudflare customers on the paid Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Pricing for Railgun is based on the size of the site, with discounts for larger sites. For example, a site with 1 million pageviews per month would pay $200/month for Railgun, while a site with 10 million pageviews would pay $1000/month.

Railgun is available as a add-on for Cloudflare’s Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. For more information on pricing, please contact Cloudflare sales.

6. How do I enable Cloudflare Railgun on my site?

Quicksteps:

1. Login to cPanel
2. Navigate to Cloudflare
3. Create An Account
4. Click Provision Account With CNAME Setup
5. Enable Railgun
6. Allow 24 Hours For SSL To Propagate

Remember, if you’re using SSL on your website, it will have to be regenerated by Cloudflare. This process takes up to 24 hours and may create errors on your secure pages.

Personally, I recommend enabling this during the weekend/off peak hours to avoid any interruption in traffic.

7. What if I’m having issues enabling Railgun?

If you experience issues when enabling Railgun, just Contact me

8. I’m not a CloudFlare customer, can I still use Railgun?

No. You need to be a CloudFlare client in order to use Railgun.

9. I’m seeing an error on my site and I think Railgun is causing it, what should I do?

If you are using Railgun via cPanel, you can turn it off straight from your control panel. Otherwise, log into your CloudFlare account, go to Performance Settings and turn Railgun off from there.