Cloudflare acquires Zaraz

Cloudflare has announced that it has acquired Zaraz, a platform built on its Cloudflare Worker. Zaraz is a third-party analysis tool founded back in 2019.

With Zaraz, companies can run as many third-party tools as they need, without slowing down their website, compromising their security, or sacrificing their customers’ privacy. Zaraz uses Cloudflare Workers to replace the multiple network requests of each tool with one single request, effectively transforming a messy web of extensions into a single lightweight application. Not only does this improve the browsing experience, but it will also give customers the ability to control what data they send to a third party, allowing them to protect their users’ privacy. Zaraz also helps to keep sites secure by preventing malicious code from entering websites by not running third-party tools on the browser.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The website relies on third-party integration from videos players, ad tracking pixels, and analytics. according to HTTP Archives Web Almanac, the median website uses around 21 to 23 third-party integrations on average depending on whether it’s the desktop or mobile. The number of integrations is even higher for high trafficked websites/platforms.

Third-Party tools hold a large impact on website performance, something that is very important to Cloudflare hence Zaraz is a valuable acquisition for Cloudflare.

Zaraz gives users the power to identify all third-party tools (e.g. Google Analytics) running on your website and then load them on the backend infrastructure (serverside). This leads to much quicker loading times when visiting a website.

Going forward, Zaraz will be rebranded as a standalone product known as Cloudflare Zaraz and be folded into Cloudflare. The product will have a free version and initially be in beta.

Before being acquired, Deploying required adding a single line of code to your website. With the acquisition, integration, and bundling directly into Cloudflare, users can now simply visit the new Zaraz panel in your Cloudflare dashboard and easily integrate the solution.