As we get ready to announce an exciting lineup and venue for HIVEMCR 25, what better time to recap on this year’s incredible talks? The opening talk from Jono Alderson focussed on how we can utilise the edge, and in particular Cloudflare, to enhance everything from site speed to SEO best practice.

As organic search marketers, we tend to fixate on content, backlinks, and branding. Add to that the recent obsession with utilising the latest AI tools for fear of getting left behind; it’s become tougher than ever to know where we should be focussing our efforts, particularly from a technical SEO perspective.

You can watch Jono’s talk, “Going Over The Edge” below, followed by a concise review of what was a fantastic way to kick off the very first HIVE MCR.

Cloudflare & The Edge

Beneath these surface strategies lies a deeper layer of the internet’s evolving infrastructure that is quickly becoming a game changer. The cutting-edge shift isn’t about a new algorithm or ad format but rather an entirely new approach to website performance, speed, and flexibility. Enter Cloudflare and the concept of “the edge”.

Jono shared his perspective of how we can use the edge and how Cloudflare can transform user experience, illustrating why businesses that harness this technology will gain a significant competitive advantage. He also explored Cloudflare’s contribution to the edge ecosystem.

The Shift from The Cloud to The Edge

Years ago, websites ran on physical servers housed in back offices, which made maintenance challenging and restricted scalability. Then came the cloud, shifting storage and infrastructure to a more accessible, scalable remote setup. Now, we’re seeing another significant shift; the edge. The edge leverages Cloudflare’s network (amongst others) of distributed data centres worldwide to store website data closer to the user rather than a single, centralised location.

As Jono explained, “It’s a hard concept to wrap your head around…rather than having my website hosted in London or LA or Dublin, it’s hosted there, and there, and on your phone, and behind the bar, and behind me, and on all these devices simultaneously.” This distributed setup speeds up load times, enhances reliability, and opens doors for personalisation, offering countless opportunities to optimise user experience.

Cloudflare – Our Gateway to the Edge

If you’ve heard of Cloudflare, you likely know it as a security or page speed tool. But Cloudflare has much more to offer, especially for technical SEO and marketers who want to push beyond traditional tactics. Here are six ways, highlighted by Jono, that Cloudflare can bring practical, powerful enhancements to your website’s performance.

Caching for Speed

Caching is one of Cloudflare’s most essential tools. By storing your site’s assets (images, scripts, stylesheets, etc.) in data centres near your users, Cloudflare reduces the time needed to load pages.

According to Jono, “If your website is slow, instead of having to wait five seconds to load your piece of clunky JavaScript and to get the font from over there, Cloudflare gobbles all of it up and serves it from that data centre and your phone and the server behind the bar.” This simple yet effective approach can help you achieve high Core Web Vitals scores, benefiting SEO performance and, of course, user experience.

With ClickiLeaks confirming that these metrics are used for organic rankings, it’s fair to presume that utilising Cloudflare effectively could have a significant impact on your domain’s organic performance.

Full Control with Edge Workers

Edge Workers in Cloudflare allow you to deploy mini-programs at the edge, giving you customisation and control. As Jono noted, “The edge allows you to intercept this process…in that moment where somebody types [your] website dot com and hits enter, instead of that request going to your server, it goes to Cloudflare’s server. And at that point, I can do anything I want.”

Whether personalising content based on location or changing elements dynamically, Edge Workers let you respond to the user instantly, without waiting on backend developers or lengthy deployment cycles.

Advanced Security & Bot Management

With an estimated 50% of online traffic coming from bots, effective bot management is crucial.

Cloudflare’s bot protection system excels at identifying and blocking unwanted bot traffic, reducing strain on servers and enhancing user experience. “You will all get half of all of your traffic [from] bots,” Jono warned, noting that “Cloudflare has the best product in the world for determining what is and what isn’t a bot.”

By minimising bot traffic, businesses can avoid skewed analytics and improve load times for actual users.

Efficient Third-Party Script Management

Third-party scripts such as ad pixels, analytics trackers, and widgets are notorious for slowing down websites. Jono highlighted how Cloudflare’s edge capabilities can intercept and optimise these scripts, vastly improving load speeds.

Through Cloudflare, scripts can be cached or served as local files, eliminating the lag from external resources and allowing for faster, smoother page loads.

Serverless Website Hosting

Cloudflare’s serverless capabilities mean you can host entire websites directly on their infrastructure without a traditional server setup. As Jono noted, “This website doesn’t exist, this is running on Cloudflare. If that ends up on the front page of Hacker News and gets a trillion hits, it will stay up.”

Serverless hosting is resilient, scalable, and highly cost-effective, enabling businesses to handle traffic spikes without compromising on performance.

Server-Side Analytics

Jono also introduced Zaraz, Cloudflare’s third-party tool management solution, which functions like Google Tag Manager but operates server-side, boosting privacy and speed. With Zaraz, you can manage tracking without the load from multiple scripts, meaning faster Core Web Vitals.

“All that mess which would have gummed up your browser…just takes care of it in the background,” he explained.

Utilising Cloudflare for Technical SEO

Cloudflare’s edge capabilities aren’t just specific to website performance and speed. Technical SEO gains using the tool are more attainable than ever. Here are a few practical SEO applications that Jono highlighted.

URL Parameter Management

Campaign tracking tags are invaluable for analytics but, as we know, can harm SEO performance by creating duplicate URLs. With Cloudflare, you can tell the server to ignore these parameters server-side, effectively simplifying your URL structure and reducing the load on your server.

“The problem with [UTM parameters] is that every combination of every campaign is creating myriad different URLs,” Jono explained. Ignoring these tags with Cloudflare’s help speeds up the site and improves performance.

Image Optimisation

Cloudflare’s edge technology makes image management a breeze by serving the optimal version based on the user’s device and connection.

Jono noted that most websites fall short in delivering the right size image for each user, saying, “You are sending too much data for the wrong size of image, for the wrong user on the wrong device universally because this is hard.”

With Cloudflare’s image resizing and compression, sites can deliver the right images to the right users without slowing things down.

Edge Technology & SEO in 2025

The edge isn’t new. Reputable SEOs such as Nick Wilsdon, Will Critchlow and others have been extolling its virtues for some time. But Cloudflare seems to be making this more accessible and allowing users to take advantage of its features via their own intuitive UI.

SEO is evolving, and 2025 looks like it will be as tumultuous a year as 2024 has been for the industry. As algorithms increasingly account for user experience, technical improvements like load speed, responsiveness, and security are becoming critical.

Leveraging edge technology provides a new level of control over these factors, directly impacting SEO in ways beyond content and keywords.

As Jono put it, “Edge is the future of architecture and development. If not Cloudflare, then this kind of ideology.” This shift from traditional to edge-based infrastructure empowers webmasters to provide an experience that’s faster, more reliable, and capable of handling the demands of a modern audience.

Embrace A New Infrastructure

As this evolution continues, the advantage will go to those who embrace the latest infrastructure improvements that edge technology makes possible.

By transforming the way websites operate at a foundational level, Cloudflare allows us to optimise performance, safeguard user experience, and increase technical agility. If you’re seeking a true edge in 2025, there’s no better time to start exploring Cloudflare’s offerings in more depth.

HIVE MCR 2025

We will be bringing you more roundups of the HIVEMCR 24 talks in the coming weeks, as we get ready to announce the programme for the 2025 event. Stay tuned!