25% of all websites now use Cloudflare as CDN

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 4 September 2026 in News, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, ArvanCloud, Cloudflare, Cloudflare, Cloudflare, Cloudflare Server, Cloudflare Web Analytics, DDoS-Guard, Fastly, Reverse Proxies, Sucuri

A content delivery network sits between your browser and the web server of the site you are visiting, acting as a reverse proxy. This architecture often brings advantages in delivery speed, and helps web masters when it comes to availability, scalability and security.

29.6% of all websites now use a reverse proxy and an impressive 84.6% of that market goes to Cloudflare, which means they just crossed the 25% mark.

The closest competitors are Amazon CloudFront and Fastly. Cloudflare is also the fastest growing CDN, with a remarkable 39% of new sites using it.

Some of the most important SaaS providers use Cloudflare, which of course helps their market share: Shopify, the most popular web hosting provider, uses Cloudflare, and so do platforms like Weebly and Jimdo.

High-traffic sites

High-traffic sites are more likely to use a CDN, as they obviously have higher requirements when it comes to managing their traffic. 52% of the top 1 million websites use a CDN, and 41.9% use Cloudflare. The numbers for the top 1000 sites are higher again: 75.4% use a CDN and 46.6% use Cloudflare, which is "only" 61.7% in that high-end market, where Akamai happens to be the closest competitor.

Regional competitors

While Cloudflare is far ahead of its competitors on a global scale, there are interesting regional differences.

click on the map to see a larger picture

DDoS-Guard is popular in Russia and Belarus, Amazon CloudFront in South Korea, ArvanCloud in Iran, and Sucuri in Saint Kitts And Nevis, in case you were wondering where the light blue area on the map is supposed to be. Another important competitor is Alibaba Cloud CDN in China, although a bit behind Cloudflare also in their home market.

Page speed

We use the Google Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) to calculate the average speed of websites using the various technologies. Cloudflare is #5 among all CDN providers when measured by Time to First Byte (TTFB). Spot #1 in that ranking goes to Variti. When measured by Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cloudflare is #2, behind Fastly.

Other services

While its CDN is Cloudflare's core product, it very successfully also offers other services. Cloudflare runs its own web server software based on Pingora. We show it as Cloudflare Server in our web server statistics, and it is currently on rank #2, only slightly behind Nginx.

Cloudflare is also the most popular DNS server provider, serving 18.1% of that market. Its email and traffic analytics services are amongst the fastest growing providers in those categories. Cloudflare also runs CDNJS, the most popular content distribution network for JavaScript libraries.

Conclusion

Cloudflare is one of the essential players when it comes to web infrastructure and web technologies, and its significance keeps growing steadily.

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Please note that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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