GitHub Pages is a static site hosting service that takes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files straight from a repository on GitHub, optionally runs the files through a build process, and publishes a website. Cloudflare is an Internet infrastructure provider designed to make everything you connect to the Internet secure, private, fast, and reliable.

My website is a Jekyll-generated static site hosted with Github Pages. Github provies 4 IPs that are actually behind Fastly CDN, making all GitHub Pages website rather fast already given Fastly’s global point of presence (PoP).

You can examine the X-Served-By header of the response from GitHub Pages servers to see which edge location your website is served from. For example:

$ curl -v https://retownplato.github.io/blog -H 'Host: chufanchen.com'
...
x-served-by: cache-qpg1223-QPG
...

The QPG key indicated that my request went throught Fastly’s Singapore endpoint. Content delivery network use anycast to routes incoming traffic to the nearest data center with the capacity to process the request efficiently.

Cloudflare offers a variety of tweaks to http response via Page Rules. The basic usage are caching static files and redirect www.xxx.com to your apex domain.

Cloudflare provies more secure HTTPS settings. With Cloudflare you can add HSTS headers to all responses coming from your website, further improving security. For newer webmasters, you might want to ensure SSL / TLS works as expected. The Full mode makes Cloudflare fetch original content from your website via HTTPS without validating the certificate on your server. You can also enable better security by enabling latest security features in Edge Certificates tab of the SSL / TLS app, where you can set the minimum SSL version (TLS 1.2 recommended) and enable automatic HTTPS redirection. This will not only make your website more secure to visitors, but also give you a boost in SEO, as modern search engines favor HTTPS websites over HTTP ones. Though, you might not want to jump straight to HSTS before you’re absolutely ready (see Cloudflare article).

You may also want to tune your website for better performance by changing the settings under the Speed app, for example enabling HTTP/2 and auto minifying.