What does Restrict Access to Cloudflare do?

In the settings of your site, there is a feature labeled Restrict Access to Cloudflare. What effect does this have on your website? And, is it generally safe to enable?

What does it do?

By default your website will accept traffic from anywhere in the world. This behavior remains unchanged when you enable Cloudflare for your domain. By default, all traffic for your site goes through Cloudflare before reaching your site. In some cases you might want to enforce this behavior though.

By enabling Restrict Access, your website will only accept traffic coming from the Cloudflare network. Any other traffic will be blocked and will never reach your website and/or server anymore.

Is it safe to enable?

In most cases: yes. Unless you are specifically and intentionally routing traffic outside of Cloudflare to your website, this setting should have no effect on the visitors of your website.

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