Barn2 Media

Barn2 Media uses Cloudflare to make their clients' websites faster and more secure for visitors from around the world.

Barn2 Media designs professional but affordable WordPress websites for small and medium businesses. With over 100 websites built in the last 7 years, they’re one of the longest established digital agencies in the UK. Barn2’s client portfolio includes London training company Happy, Paris-based biotechnology firm Depixus, and recruitment specialists Advertise-a-Job.com.

Barn2 Media's Challenge: Finding a Quick & Affordable Way to Speed Up Websites

Barn2 Media often use premade WordPress themes to keep costs down for their customers. However, these themes can be bloated behind the scenes making websites slow performing. Katie Keith, operations director at Barn2 Media, explained “If you're using a big theme with several advanced plugins then there's a risk that your website will slow down. Slow page load times are bad news because they damage your SEO, put off your visitors, and increase bounce rates. Especially if it's an ecommerce site the cost of lost sales over time can easily outweigh the initial savings from using off-the-shelf themes and plugins. We needed a solution that would improve performance on our clients' websites without sacrificing the savings we were passing on from using the premade implements."

Barn2 Media's Solution: Lightning fast CDN with Strong Security

Barn2 Media discovered Cloudflare about 3 years ago after reading articles about it in WordPress news updates. "For each client, we used the Pingdom page speed tool to measure the average page load time before and after setting up Cloudflare," noted Keith. "For each website that we enabled Cloudflare on, we saw huge speed improvements. We recorded improvements of between 26-60%, with an average speed increase of 44% across all of our websites. For one of our sites simply turning on Cloudflare reduced the page load time from 6.36 seconds to 2.56 seconds. We were really surprised to see the greatest speed improvements for sites that had audiences located from far from origin server locations. Because Cloudflare's CDN serves the website content from a data center that it geographically close to each visitor site speed greatly improved. This is crucial for us as some of our clients are hosting their site in one location but targeting visitors across different continents. For example, we have clients with websites hosted in the UK wanting to attract a US audience and Cloudflare instantly improved the US performance of those sites."

On the security front Cloudflare allows Barn2 Media to keep customer website light and high performing while maintaining security at the edge. “We try to avoid using extra WordPress security plugins, as they are often overkill and slow down people’s websites,” Keith explained. “Instead, we make our clients’ websites secure by following the latest WordPress security best practices and using Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation and Web Application Firewall (WAF).” Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation is best in class with capacity to whether the largest attacks on the Internet. By leveraging anycast technology Cloudflare’s global network is designed so data centers in over 330 cities work together to protect customer’s sites and customer origin IP’s are obfuscated so only good traffic touches their servers. Keith noted “We also enjoy that Cloudflare makes SSL so easy because SSL is quickly becoming a requirement across the internet. These security features give our clients extra peace of mind and help to protect their websites without having to pay for any additional security.”