One company sits between more of the internet and its users than almost any other. Cloudflare shows up on 22% of all 760,000+ websites in our database. That's more than one in five sites routing their traffic through Cloudflare's network before it reaches you. More than WordPress. More than Google Analytics. It's tied with Google Fonts as the most commonly detected web technology in our dataset.
How did a company founded in 2009 become the backbone of nearly a quarter of the web? And what does that mean for security, performance, and the internet as a whole? We dug into our data to find out.
Making it the most detected infrastructure technology across 760,000+ analyzed domains
For people who aren't deep in web infrastructure, Cloudflare can be confusing. It's not a hosting company — your website still lives on your own server. Cloudflare sits in front of your server, acting as a middleman between your visitors and your site. When someone visits your URL, their request goes to Cloudflare first, and Cloudflare either serves a cached copy or forwards the request to your server.
This provides three main benefits:
And the kicker? The basic plan is free. Genuinely, usefully free. That's a huge part of why adoption is so high.
Sites using Cloudflare have an average trust score of 69 out of 100. That's six points above the global average of 63. The gap is consistent and statistically significant across our entire dataset.
Why? Several reasons stack up:
Cloudflare provides free SSL. Every site on Cloudflare gets HTTPS automatically, even on the free plan. This immediately puts Cloudflare sites ahead of the 16% of the web still running without encryption. Among Cloudflare sites, HTTPS adoption is essentially 100%.
Cloudflare adds security headers. Cloudflare can automatically add or modify security headers like HSTS. While 80% of all sites lack Content-Security-Policy, Cloudflare users have tools to easily add these headers through the dashboard or page rules.
Self-selection bias. Site owners who take the step to put Cloudflare in front of their site are already more security-conscious than average. They're more likely to also configure email authentication, keep their software updated, and maintain their sites. Cloudflare doesn't cause all the security improvement — it correlates with the kind of person who cares about this stuff.
Average trust score for Cloudflare sites vs. global average across 760K+ domains
We covered this in our fastest websites analysis, but it's worth highlighting here. Sites using Cloudflare have response times averaging 40-60% faster than sites without any CDN. That's a massive difference.
The math is simple. Without a CDN, a visitor in Tokyo requesting a page from a server in Virginia needs their request to cross the Pacific Ocean and back. With Cloudflare, they get served from Cloudflare's Tokyo data center. The round-trip latency drops from hundreds of milliseconds to single-digit milliseconds for cached content.
Even for dynamic content that can't be fully cached, Cloudflare's network optimizations (Argo Smart Routing, HTTP/3 support, connection coalescing) reduce latency. And Cloudflare Workers lets developers run code at the edge, bringing computation closer to users without changing their hosting setup.
Cloudflare adoption varies significantly by the type of site:
The adoption gap between tech-savvy and non-tech site owners is notable. Cloudflare's free tier is powerful enough for any small business site, but many small business owners either don't know about it or think it's "too technical." Cloudflare's onboarding has gotten much simpler, but there's still a gap to bridge.
Cloudflare adoption varies by hosting country, though less than you might expect:
Germany's slightly lower adoption is interesting. German companies and individuals have sometimes expressed concerns about routing their traffic through a US company's network. GDPR-related data residency discussions have affected Cloudflare's adoption there, though Cloudflare has addressed this with EU-only data processing options. For more country-level security comparisons, see our web security by country analysis.
WordPress powers 20% of the web, and Cloudflare's WordPress integration is one of its most popular use cases. Our data shows that WordPress sites using Cloudflare score an average trust score of 66, compared to 55 for WordPress sites without Cloudflare. That's an 11-point gap.
The combination makes a lot of sense. WordPress sites are notoriously targeted by bots and brute-force attacks. Cloudflare's WAF blocks common attack patterns before they reach the WordPress installation. The CDN caching also dramatically reduces load on the often-overtaxed PHP backend, making the site faster and more resistant to traffic spikes.
If you run WordPress and aren't using Cloudflare (or a similar CDN), it's probably the single highest-impact change you can make. We covered this in detail in our WordPress security analysis.
The combination of WordPress + Cloudflare (free tier) + a caching plugin is one of the most effective and cheapest ways to improve both security and speed. Our data shows an 11-point trust score improvement for WordPress sites that add Cloudflare.
Here's the flip side of Cloudflare's success: concentration risk. When 22% of the web depends on one company's network, that company becomes a single point of failure. Cloudflare outages — which do happen occasionally — don't just take down one website. They take down millions simultaneously.
We saw this in 2024 when a Cloudflare configuration issue caused widespread brief outages. Sites that had their origin servers accessible directly recovered quickly. Sites that depended entirely on Cloudflare (using Cloudflare Pages or Workers exclusively) had no fallback.
This isn't a reason to avoid Cloudflare. The availability benefits far outweigh the rare outage risks for most sites. But it's worth understanding that the modern web has some concentrated dependencies — Cloudflare, AWS, and a handful of other infrastructure providers underpin a massive portion of online activity.
Cloudflare isn't the only CDN, of course. AWS CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, and Bunny CDN all compete in this space. But our data clearly shows Cloudflare dominating the small-to-medium website segment. Its advantages:
Enterprise sites are more likely to use AWS CloudFront or Akamai, which offer tighter integration with specific hosting platforms and more customization options. But for the majority of websites — blogs, small businesses, startups, personal projects — Cloudflare's free plan is hard to beat.
For all its benefits, Cloudflare doesn't solve everything. We still see sites on Cloudflare with poor trust scores because:
That last point is worth emphasizing. Cloudflare provides service to virtually anyone who signs up. The presence of Cloudflare on a site doesn't mean the site is trustworthy. Our guide to spotting website red flags covers what to actually look for.
If you're running a website and not using a CDN, yes. Almost certainly yes. The free tier gives you meaningful speed improvements, basic DDoS protection, free SSL, and DNS management. The setup takes about 15 minutes.
If you're already using another CDN that you're happy with, there's no compelling reason to switch just for the sake of it. AWS CloudFront, Fastly, and Bunny CDN are all solid options.
If you're concerned about Cloudflare's access to your traffic (which is a valid concern — Cloudflare can see all unencrypted traffic passing through its network), consider that you're already trusting your hosting provider with the same access. Adding Cloudflare adds one more party, but the security benefits usually outweigh the trust trade-off.
Want to see if a website uses Cloudflare? Run it through Bitverzo and we'll detect Cloudflare along with every other technology on the site.
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Analyze a Website →Based on Bitverzo's analysis of 760,000+ domains, approximately 22% of websites use Cloudflare. This makes it the most detected infrastructure technology in our database, tied with Google Fonts and ahead of WordPress (20%) and Bootstrap (11%).
Yes. Sites using Cloudflare average a trust score of 69/100, compared to the global average of 63/100. This comes from Cloudflare's automatic HTTPS, DDoS protection, and security features, plus self-selection (Cloudflare users tend to be more security-conscious overall).
Yes. Cloudflare offers a free tier that includes CDN caching, DNS hosting, basic DDoS protection, and free SSL certificates. The free plan covers most needs for small to medium websites. Paid plans ($20/month and up) add advanced WAF rules, image optimization, priority support, and more.
Data in this article is based on Bitverzo's analysis of 760,000+ domains as of July 2026. Cloudflare detection is based on HTTP header analysis, DNS records, and JavaScript fingerprinting. View technology trends or see the top-rated websites.