Yesterday, Today on the Cloudflare Community

Welcome to Yesterday Today on the Cloudflare Community. I'm your host Tim Cloonan.

If you'd like to know more about the Cloudflare community, join us every Friday for a new edition of Yesterday Today.

Each week, we start by looking at a summary of popular topics and site traffic from last week with this community day and the community traffic report starting at 10am Pacific.

That's followed by a review of top community issues from last week, the ever informative using the community tip, occasional interviews with community MVPs, Cloudflare employees and partners.

And every week we feature in class with Cloudflare, where we learn a few things from the community and put them into a Yesterday Today community tip that you can access via the short link that we'll share in a moment.

Turning to the traffic report.

Overall, community traffic was flat versus the prior week.

Nonetheless, new posts and new topics were up substantially over the previous week.

That basically means the same number of people were talking about a lot more things on the community last week.

The number of new customers joining the community increased week over week and remains up for the interview.

For this community day last week, the top three searches on the community were regarding 521 errors, followed by searches for 524 errors, and finally posts about the Chrome same site cookie error.

You may recall that last week, we also reported a high number of searches for 521 and 524 errors and that pattern clearly continued this past week.

The most popular category for discussion on the community last week was security with questions about the WAF leading the discussion.

Activity in the security category was followed by the second most active category of DNS and network with questions about name servers again leading the category.

We saw that last week as well. The next was performance category with questions about cash leading the area and again cash and performance were popular subject over the last several weeks.

You may recall last week that security and performance were also two of our top three categories as they had been in three of our past four shows.

And that leads us to our top story today.

This morning on yesterday, today on the Cloudflare community, we're capping off a theme that we've hit on over the course of the last five episodes.

Today we're going to touch on that theme of getting started with Cloudflare once again.

We've talked about getting started with DNS, getting started with security, getting started with performance and getting started on the community.

And today we're going to tie all of those themes together with a formal welcome to Cloudflare and an introduction to the new Cloudflare Welcome Center.

The Welcome Center is for any Cloudflare customers that started to explore the power of Cloudflare, as well as for those that are experienced with Cloudflare to visit for a step by step verification of your core setup, create advanced configurations and to connect with the Cloudflare community for advice and insight.

Before we dig in, we're going to be referencing a number of sites, posts, tips and tutorials throughout the show.

Go to the link that's shown on the screen to follow along now or later to review the assets that we're going to be sharing during the show today.

Next, let me ask you to join the show by sending your questions to livestudio at Cloudflare.tv or just hit that email to the show button on the Cloudflare TV screen.

And now, welcome to the Welcome Center. I'm joined this week by Alvin Lin of Cloudflare.

Alvin's going to share a brand new site from Cloudflare and talk to us about how it came about.

Alvin, thanks for joining.

I appreciate you taking time to join us on the show today. Thanks for having me on, Sam.

I'm excited to be sharing this update with our Cloudflare community.

This is my first time on the segment, so perhaps I should introduce myself.

I work in growth marketing, specifically user retention. So on a day -to-day basis, our team is obsessed with ensuring that our users are happy with Cloudflare.

We're constantly thinking about ensuring that their user experience exceeds their expectations and that Cloudflare is helpful for them.

So what does this look like?

It starts with the moment you sign up. Your onboarding journey begins, and so does our job.

So my goal is to get users activated, acclimated, and adopted on our core products.

Begin enabling the full suite of security and performance features to ensure that you get the most out of your plan type and that you're postured with the right interactions and resources so that you feel empowered to tackle the challenges that are most important to your site, network, and business.

So today we're releasing the first wave of the Welcome Center, and I'm excited to be talking more about that.

That's fantastic. I'm curious.

We see on the community a lot of new sites come into being, and we get questions about the sites as we see them, as they're being brought up, as they're initially instantiated, as they improve over time.

And every time I see a new web property, I'm always curious as to the motivation behind it, because that helps me to understand a little bit about the site.

Can you talk to a little bit about your motivation behind creating the Welcome Center?

Yeah, certainly. Let's take a step back, I think, just for a moment and take a bird's eye view of the user journey from beginning to end.

So you start with signing up, and there's an ambiguous phase called onboarding.

You sort of poke around on the site some more and find some new stuff to play with, configure a few settings, and maybe from there you think you're set.

Or maybe not. Maybe you're the type of user to set it and forget it and not really worry too much about it.

That's just fine. But we're asking, have our users gotten the most out of what we designed and intended for them?

So if we zoom in on where we observed our users' behaviors, that showed an incredible opportunity for us to improve experience in three ways.

Unification, guidance, and clarity.

We ran an analysis that found that a significant number of users struggled or abandoned the setup stage and never really fully realized the benefits of a cloud for products waiting for them, just around the corner.

So we knew we needed to change this.

We wanted to rethink how we could help accelerate a user's ability to onboard and get started quickly without any of this fluff.

So essentially we asked ourselves, if you hired a technical engineer to help you walk through the best practice recommended setup, what would that look like?

How could we bring this knowledge for anyone using Cloudflare to understand regardless of prior technical background or any plan type?

So that's what we did. We worked with our best solution engineers, interviewed actual customers, and designed the Welcome Center based on those learnings.

So what you get is an incredibly simple yet helpful experience.

That's fantastic.

The thing that I liked, can we actually take a look at the site? Yeah, please.

Let's do that. Okay. All right.

So this is the main page of the Welcome Center. Oh, yes. So let's actually start.

Let's actually walk through the site, starting with the overview page, right?

So if you're browsing around Cloudflare.com, you can find this under the resources tab up on top.

You'll see the main section on this page is a getting started section called the step-by-step guide for your core setup.

This is where you walk through the essential steps you need to take to set up your site.

We also give the Cloudflare community a nod and actually encourage our users to engage.

We know the best answers for common questions and the more obscure questions can be found there.

So let's move on to the activation page, Tim. Fantastic. I love that first page.

It's like, yeah, here's how I get started. If you have trouble getting started, here's how you troubleshoot it.

Here's people that can help you.

And oh, by the way, here's the help center if you need to. I mean, that's just fantastic.

Yeah. So let's go to activation. Yeah. Great. So this is the activation page.

What's the difference between activation and core setup might be the question.

Well, activation guides you from steps A to B, your very first steps. If you have no idea what you're doing, but you want to use Cloudflare, start here.

If you don't need the help, don't worry.

You can fly past this quickly. Once you've confirmed your name server change, you'll receive an email that points you to core setup.

So the quick start guide is basically a new release on the dashboard. It walks you through extremely beneficial, but low risk, low effort features you can enable right away.

For example, your SSL, TLS encryption modes, enabling HTTPS, improving performance with auto minify, and also broadly.

Backtracking just above that, Tim, the account setup.

Again, this is for people who are just getting started.

You need absolute handholding and guidance. We'll get you right through that.

So we get a lot of these quick start sort of one button enablement features out of the way on the activation tab.

And once you've activated your site, you're ready to move on to completing your core setup, which is sort of the next step.

Gotcha. The thing that struck me on the activation page was this ability to toggle from my plan type.

Yeah. As soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, free plan, but I've got a pro.

And then they saw the toggle and I was thinking, oh, this is fantastic.

Because one of the things we see on the community is we see people that have a lot of different plan types.

Sure. And they'll get confused sometimes in terms of, I've got a biz plan, but then I want those features in my free account.

And being able to see it laid out like this is really, really nice. Absolutely.

And I can use the core setup for any of the plans? You can use the core setup for any of the plans.

And here we are. Let's start sort of from top to bottom.

And I want to double click on the plan type toggle too. So it's quick access.

You're presented with a different set of getting started recommendations for every plan.

So pro plan users obviously have a different set of features that they pay for and then business plan as well.

Our job was to make sure that you get the most out of every plan type that you're toggling off of.

So at the top, there's also a time completion estimate and a level.

So you're comfortable getting started without having to abandon a task without some sense of how long it'll take you.

You'll notice right under that, Tim, that we start with DNS configuration. It seems redundant, but it's intentional.

So I always give the analogy that it's pointless to tune your car by adding a more powerful engine, much like improving performance.

Or adding a roll bar, much like improving security and safety without installing a steering wheel and a GPS system to get you where you need to go.

So that said, it's vitally important that we ensure your DNS records are fully configured first and foremost.

So for performance, we hit all the one click enablement features that have been tested and proven to improve loading speed and overall performance.

We've scraped every single feature under a dashboard as of today.

And we're always evolving and changing and adding more stuff. But as of today, and distilled this and curated in a way such that it says, hey, hit these, pay attention to these.

So for example, under the free plan, this includes cache settings, the rocket loader feature, zero RTT connection resumption, and the always online feature.

And that's just for the free plan. So if you hit sort of the accordion, the plus button, it'll expand with the screenshot and all of that.

Oh, that's really sweet.

Yeah. Tim, if you don't mind, can we toggle to the pro plan? Yep.

Just want to give an example of sort of the security section for users.

So security has always been like a really interesting thing to figure out.

And it's something that can't be generalized.

Every site and every business has its own needs. We try to cut through the noise and curate which features we need to pay attention to the most.

Again, based on your plan type. So for pro, we start with DNSSEC to ensure DNS authentication.

WAF rule configurations. Our Cloudflare managed rule set, which is an out-of-the-box protection grouping of firewall rules.

How to customize page rules, hotlink protection, and personalizing error and challenge pages.

So what you're seeing is a detailed breakdown complete with screenshots.

And we really think that this curated getting started guide will really help our users get up and running quickly.

And on a good start to having their site optimized.

That is fantastic. So the thing that struck me right away as I looked at that was the issues that we've had in terms of the topics on the community have been DNS security and performance for 80% of the last two months.

I hit this page and I see DNS security and performance set right out in front of me.

I mean, these are the things that we see people talking about all the time.

Have you guys been watching the show?

This is great. This exactly aligns with what we see. Right on, right on.

Yeah, I will talk about that in just a sec. There's some good feedback from the community directly that has gone into influencing this.

I do want to cover the health check page.

So once you're done with the core setup, what do you do next? Let's go to the health check page.

And the experience is supposed to be linear. You're supposed to move from left to right from activation core setup to health check.

So here we are at the health check tab. We're still working out some design aspects.

We want to make sure that this renders fully on the page so it's easy to see.

Again, this is a new release. So we're working out the first kinks, but this diagnostic tool is powerful.

Simply type in your URL, and you can type in any of these.

And our script will run a check against all your settings to reveal which critical settings have been configured under the DNS tab, the HTTP tab, the SSL TLS tab, and speed tab.

You can even try like Cloudflare.com, maybe even. As long as it's the real domain, it would work.

I was testing a site that we had intentionally broken on a previous episode, so I was going to return a lot of errors.

There we are. This is fantastic. Yeah. Oh, that was quick. Yeah. So if you see a green check, you're good to go.

If you see a red X mark, you can resolve that issue directly in your dashboard.

We don't see any on this one because we're rendering the Cloudflare .com, and I sure hope that we have all of these things configured.

But we believe that this health check would be such a value add for users to be able to prescriptively identify what's going on right, what's going on wrong, and pinpoint exactly what needs to be fixed.

I think one of the pain points for me as a new user when I first joined Cloudflare was I don't know what I don't know.

I don't know what I needed to fix. So this tries to address that head on.

Yeah, I think that is certainly a recurring theme that we see on the community as well in that it's difficult to know how to formulate a question.

I think in one of our episodes we had one of our MVPs on, and we were talking particularly in the context of mixed content.

Because mixed content doesn't get expressed in 99% of the time that people have a problem, and it occurs frequently.

It doesn't get expressed as mixed content. It gets expressed as my padlock's missing, my padlock's broken, my site doesn't load.

It's usually people are going to go into CSS and they're saying, oh, my style sheet's messed up or whatever.

And this actually tells me. Now I know how to ask a question. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. Well said. That's fantastic. Taking in some of that sort of observation from the community.

So a lot of this, much of this simple experience was influenced directly from honest face -to-face user interviews that were conducted just a few months ago.

And so I wanted to share some context around the customer research, too, I think would be interesting for our viewers.

We set out to learn as much as we could about customer behavior, desires, what is it that you want to get out of Cloudflare, and their ideas about the onboarding process.

So we asked questions like, to you, when is onboarding defined as complete?

This helped us gain a sense of how that journey was defined across users, across plan types.

We needed to figure out how to best address the onboarding process in a finite number of steps and define what success looked like.

I think what we found was it was a varying response, what onboarding looked like across customers.

And so if we couldn't define that, we could not solve for it.

Some additional questions that were asked were, what were your top challenges during the Cloudflare setup process?

Many said DNS, to your point, Tim, was a huge pain in terms of clarity and what the best recommendation would be next.

Another question was, once I have traffic running through my site, what do I do next?

So we compared those responses against our support tickets.

And indeed, we saw that DNS and SSL TLS was a top issue for users within the first 24 hours and three days of joining.

And I think you'll see that on the community, too, on those threads for new users, that those are topics.

Everything's very consistent across the board. So I just want to give a big thanks to our Cloudflare community, because a large fraction of our interviews were conducted with our community MVPs.

And we appreciate your help so much. Oh, that's fantastic.

That is great. I mean, this is a really, really nice site right out of the box.

We can use this today. In fact, we started using it yesterday. It's fantastic.

Where is it going to go? What's the plan? What's the next step? I know things don't hold still at Cloudflare.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, there's more to come.

This is literally just the first iteration of what we're doing. So we're currently working on delivering the same efficiency as you see on the Welcome Center here to our large enterprise customers.

And so internally, what we're doing is there's a constant flow of learning, creating, and then testing, and then learning again, and then reapplying those learnings between the user segments.

So we started with self-serve customers, you know, all three million of them.

And we're applying that sort of upmarket to our larger segments.

And in the way that we're developing assets for them, we're testing that and relearning how to reabsorb that back into our self-serve customers.

So there's a constant flow of learning, testing, creating, and it's a beautiful thing.

We can't do it fast enough because people are asking for it.

And so the future roadmap for the Welcome Center includes technical guides on deeper product adoption, use case best practices.

I think that would be really interesting, according to your business type, e -commerce, retail, financial services, recorded multimedia.

I know people have different learning styles, which include demo videos and other resources to help move users along in their journey in the most helpful ways.

So, again, our goal is to become just a helpful resource to move you from point A to point B all the way to Z.

Nice. This is really exciting. Your vision for the Welcome Center aligns really well to our vision of how we work with customers on the community.

And it's really, really exciting.

We're incredibly grateful to have tools like this available.

I know there's a lot of resources that are available on the web. We catalog a couple hundred of them in some of our different tips.

What I like about this is that it's me doing the setup, getting feedback on the setup, and measuring and monitoring and metering my site is all done in one place.

And that's fantastic.

And then it keeps getting better, which is even, I guess, gravy for the whole thing, right?

I mean, that's the add-on benefit. That's good. So it leads to a final question, Alvin.

As you keep on growing this center, will you come back and share more?

Oh, absolutely. I'm excited. I'm grateful for the Cloudflare community.

I'm always excited to share more. Please have me back. Excellent. Fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Alvin. Thank you, Tim. Take care. All right.

Alvin, thank you. It is great to have you on the show, but particularly on this episode where we kind of finish up our series on getting started with Cloudflare.

This show, as I mentioned, is a cap to that series, and it's something we've been doing over the last several weeks.

We've covered so many of the details and the nuances about getting started, not just with Cloudflare, but with new websites in general.

And getting started with Cloudflare is potentially overwhelming, especially when you consider the massive scale at which the Cloudflare network operates.

To conceptually understand that is mind-boggling. It really is.

And it's quite daunting when you think about your website becoming part of the fabric of the Internet and taking its place in this massive network.

It can become a little bit overwhelming.

And we understand that. So for the next several weeks, we're going to shift our focus a little bit.

We're not going to be talking a lot about the Cloudflare network as a whole, but we are going to be talking about different components and different pieces.

Specifically, we're going to be serving up slices of a very, very, very humble raspberry pie.

So we go from talking about a very massive network to talking about perhaps some of the little tiniest computers that's available.

So you all have raspberry pies hanging around. They're floating somewhere in your house, and they're available.

So I need you to dig out your raspberry pie and join us for the next few episodes, because we're going to be talking about raspberry pie in a few different ways.

We're going to start next week.

We're going to talk about Panther Hub One, which is an open source raspberry pie project that uses Cloudflare's OneDot for families.

And it turns your raspberry pie into a Wi-Fi router with parental controls.

That sounds like it's a lot better use of my raspberry pie than using it as a media center or a retro gaming machine.

But I'll use them for those as well. But this way, you can actually make your pie make your family safe, which is really nice.

So in anticipation of that, what I need you to do is to find the pie you know is hanging around your house.

Dig it out of the basement, rescue it from the kids' room, pull it out of the closet, or simply just go and order two or three more pies and get ready for the next set of shows.

And that leads us to our last pro tip for this Getting Started series. Visit the Welcome Center.

The Welcome Center is a fantastic new asset. We encourage you to use it.

If you have feedback on the Welcome Center, we'd love to hear it. Come to the Cloudflare community.

Tell us what you think about the Welcome Center. Let Alvin know how you think we can continue to improve and grow that property.

And we'll have Alvin back on.

We're going to talk about future iterations of the Welcome Center as we go forward.

Thank you for joining us today. Remember, line up your raspberry pie, get a hold of that, get ready for the next series of shows.

I'm your host, Tim Clunan.

I'll see you next Friday at 10 a.m. with your raspberry pie in hand for a new edition of Yesterday Today on the Cloudflare community.

And until then, we'll see you in the community.

Welcome to the Cloudflare community.

Welcome to the Cloudflare community. Welcome to the Cloudflare community.

Welcome to the Cloudflare community.

Hi, we're Cloudflare.

We're building one of the world's largest global cloud networks to help make the Internet faster, more secure, and more reliable.

Meet our customer, HubSpot.

They're building software products that transform the way businesses market and sell online.

My name is Carrie Muntz, and I'm the Director of Engineering for the Platform Infrastructure Teams here at HubSpot.

Our customers are sales and marketing professionals.

They just need to know that we've got this.

We knew that the way that HubSpot was growing and scaling, we needed to be able to do this without having to hire an army of people to manage this.

That's why HubSpot turned to Cloudflare.

Our job was to make sure that HubSpot, and all of HubSpot's customers, could get the latest encryption quickly and easily.

We were trying to optimize SSL issuance and onboarding for tens of thousands of customer domains.

Previously, because of the difficulties we were having with our old process, we had about 5% of customers SSL enabled.

And with the release of version 68 of Chrome, it became quickly apparent that we needed to get more customers onto HTTPS very quickly to avoid insecure browsing warnings.

With Cloudflare, we just did it, and it was easier than we expected.

Performance is also crucial to HubSpot, which leverages the deep customization and technical capabilities enabled by Cloudflare.

What Cloudflare gives us is a lot of knobs and dials to configure exactly how we want to cache content at the edge.

And that results in a better experience, a faster experience for customers.

Cloudflare actually understands the Internet.

We were able to turn on TLS 1.3 with zero round -trip time with the click of a button.

There's a lot of technology behind that. Another pillar of HubSpot's experience with Cloudflare has been customer support.

The support with Cloudflare is great.

It feels like we're working with another HubSpot team.

They really seem to care. They take things seriously. I filed cases and gotten responses back in under a minute.

The quality of the responses is just night and day difference.

Cloudflare has been fantastic. It was really an exciting, amazing time to see when you have teams working very closely together, HubSpot on one side and Cloudflare on the other side, on this mission to solve for your customers' problems, which is their businesses.

It really was magic. With customers like HubSpot and over 10 million other domains that trust Cloudflare with their security and performance, we're making the Internet fast, secure, and reliable for everyone.

Cloudflare, helping build a better Internet.