Cloudflare and WordPress.com Combine Forces on Privacy-First Tools
Cloudflare’s stated mission is to help build a better Internet, and the company has roughly 25 million Internet properties secured and accelerated on its platform. In looking for partners with similar reach and goals, Cloudflare has turned to Automattic, the maintainer of the open-source WordPress software and operator of WordPress.com, a hosting platform that serves up to 409 million readers and 20 billion pages per month.
The collaboration centers on a shared value: privacy. Both companies envision a more private Internet, and their first joint initiative reflects that focus. Cloudflare’s privacy-first web analytics are now integrated into WordPress.com, giving publishers a choice in how they collect usage data and derive insights about their visitors. This means site owners can use a privacy-conscious analytics solution without sending visitor data to third-party trackers.
Analytics Integration in the WordPress.com Dashboard
The integration is designed to be straightforward. WordPress.com publishers will find Cloudflare Web Analytics settings under the Marketing area of their dashboard. From there, users can paste in the analytics code snippet, and WordPress.com handles injecting the code into the site at runtime. No manual theme edits or separate plugin installations are required.
For existing Cloudflare customers, the analytics data will appear in the Cloudflare dashboard alongside other performance and security metrics. For those new to Cloudflare, the WordPress.com dashboard also includes links to Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) and CDN services, which can be enabled from the Cloudflare dashboard.
Building on the Automatic Platform Optimization Launch
This is not the first WordPress-focused effort from Cloudflare. In October, the company introduced Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress sites, a service that Cloudflare's testing showed can improve Time to First Byte (TTFB) by up to 72%. That product proved popular with the shared customer base of both companies, which encouraged further integration work between the two platforms.
The combination of WordPress.com and Cloudflare brings together cloud security and performance with a major content management and publishing platform. The addition of native privacy-first web analytics support in WordPress.com extends that relationship, but it is only one step in what both companies describe as an ongoing effort toward a better Internet.
More information is available on Cloudflare's dedicated landing page for WordPress.com users.
