Learn more about Cloudflare Geolocation Blocking. Our Cloudflare Support team is here to help you with your questions and concerns.

Cloudflare Geolocation Blocking | About

Cloudflare Geolocation blocking is a feature offered by Cloudflare. It allows website owners to restrict or control access to their websites based on the geographical location of the users.

Let’s take a look at how this feature works:

1. When a user tries to access a website protected by Cloudflare, Cloudflare first checks the user’s geographical location based on their IP address.
2. Then, Cloudflare compares the user’s location with the blocking rules set up by the website owner. These rules specify which countries or regions should be allowed or denied access to the website.
3. Based on the comparison, Cloudflare either allows or blocks the user’s access to the website accordingly.

Here are some of the reasons why website owners prefer to use geolocation blocking:

• Sometimes, websites need to adhere to specific legal requirements or regulations that indicate which countries or regions can access certain types of content or services. Geolocation blocking helps enforce these restrictions.
• Geolocation blocking can also be used as a security measure to prevent access from known malicious or high-risk regions where a website might be more vulnerable to attacks.
• Website owners may want to restrict access to their content based on geographical considerations, like licensing agreements.
• By blocking traffic from certain regions, website owners can optimize their server resources and ensure better performance for users in regions that are more relevant to their target audience.

How to set up Geolocation blocking with Cloudflare

1. First, sign up for Cloudflare and add our website to our Cloudflare account. This involves updating our domain’s nameservers to point to Cloudflare’s nameservers.
2. Then, log in to the Cloudflare account and head to the Firewall settings for our domain.
3. Next, create a new firewall rule specifically for geolocation blocking in the Firewall settings. This rule will define the conditions under which traffic should be blocked based on the user’s geographical location.
4. Now, set up a condition that checks the visitor’s country or region in the rule.
5. After setting the geolocation condition, specify the action to take if the condition is met. This action is usually “Block” to deny access to users from specific countries or regions.
6. Now, we have to specify the countries or regions we want to block.
7. Then, save the rule settings.
8. Before deploying the rule to the live website, it’s a good idea to test it to ensure it’s working as expected.

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Conclusion

In brief, our Support Experts demonstrated how to configure Cloudflare Geolocation Blocking.