My blog was showing poor performance, with some pages taking several seconds to load or even failing entirely.

My entire site runs behind Cloudflare with a 200 second cache TTL. This means my backend normally doesn't even notice spikes in traffic as they are mostly served from the Cloudflare cache.

Unfortunately this trick doesn't help for crawlers that are hitting every possible combination of facets on my search page!

Using Cloudflare to rate limit requests to a path