What is a Reverse Proxy? Everything You Need to Know

Behind every fast, secure, and scalable website is a layer of invisible infrastructure working hard — often led by a reverse proxy.

A reverse proxy functions as a middleman server that sits between the user's web browser and your backend host server. 

Think of it as your website's receptionist. 

Requests from internet traffic go to the reverse proxy, which then communicates with the backend server and forwards responses back to the user. 

While some teams shy away from reverse proxies, In 2025, they are more common and more important than ever. 

Here are the top reasons why: 

• Modern cybersecurity threats are highly sophisticated, and a reverse proxy is a single entry point that filters out bad traffic. 
• Reverse proxies can improve site speed and uptime, which directly impact the user experience and your website's profitability.
• Consolidate traffic tracking and first-party data collection. 
• Unlock marketing personalization opportunities (i.e., location-based dynamic content) without impacting website performance. 

In this post, we'll cover everything there is to know about reverse proxy. 

We'll also discuss ways to reap the full benefits of reverse proxies for ecommerce websites.

Let's get started.

What is a Reverse Proxy?

In simple terms, a reverse proxy server works like a gatekeeper that handles incoming requests on the backend server's behalf. 

It is the exact opposite of a forward proxy, which is a client-side intermediary server acting on behalf of the user. 

While forward proxies are usually for tasks like masking IP addresses, accessing geo-locked content, and anonymous browsing, reverse proxies are primarily for cybersecurity, more reliable website performance, and custom experiences. 

Key Benefits of Using a Reverse Proxy

In a modern website's architecture, reverse proxies can offer the following benefits:

1. Load Balancing

Load balancing ensures that no volume of traffic can ever overwhelm your servers. 

Think of it as your own, server-side traffic management system. By distributing traffic requests across a network of backend servers, your website can maintain solid performance, uptime, and scalability. 

Load balancing through reverse proxies also comes with the added bonus of preemptively protecting your website against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. 

Rather than letting thousands of bot traffic flood your website and deny access, they're automatically dispersed across multiple backend servers — keeping your website live and accessible to real users. This works even better if you also have a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or edge delivery service. 

2. Caching 

Reverse proxies can be used to enable advanced caching techniques. 

At a basic level, a cache stores copies of frequently accessed website content — quickly serving them to users while reducing the load on the origin server. 

With tools like Nginx and Varnish, reverse proxies can enable techniques like: 

• Fragment caching — Reverse proxies can store specific cached components while keeping dynamic elements uncached. 
• Cache warming — Pre-populate the cache with frequently requested items on a proxy level. 
• Multi-level caching — Speed up your site while greatly minimizing the load on your origin server with multi-layered caching (e.g., proxy server, edge delivery network, and client-side). 

Take note that caching is particularly important for ecommerce businesses, especially for high-traffic pages such as product listings and categories. This ensures consistent stability and loading speed for all customers, which has a direct impact on conversion rates and overall profitability. 

3. Enhanced Security 

Protecting your site from DDoS attacks is just one of the many perks of reverse proxies in terms of security.  

A reverse proxy creates a secure buffer zone for traffic before it's allowed to interact with your backend server. It can terminate SSL connections even with encrypted traffic and use Web Application Firewall (WAF) integrations to make sure only legitimate traffic reaches your website. 

In addition, a reverse proxy hides your server's IP address and obscures your website's internal configuration. 

This essentially shields your infrastructure from malicious traffic — detecting, blocking, or absorbing them before they cause damage.

4. Centralized Logging & Analysis

By working as a central entry point for all inbound traffic, a reverse proxy not only simplifies traffic logging and analytics. 

It also makes it easier to diagnose issues and implement the required improvements since everyone is coming through the same checkpoint. 

This is instrumental when it comes to collecting and managing first-party customer data. 

Rather than setting up traffic tracking and analytics across multiple channels, your reverse proxy can be configured to gather just about any type of information (ethically), including:

• Response metrics — Request size, request methods, request count, and more.
• Traffic and client information — IP address, geographic location, and user agents.
• Performance data — Throughput, connection time, latency, and Time To First Byte (TTFB).

5. Improved Site Performance

Reverse proxies often work hand in hand with edge delivery systems, which offer huge improvements in website performance.  

Platforms like Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine, for instance, use a reverse proxy architecture to deliver sub-second load times. A reverse proxy also makes it possible to apply customizations — from custom routing to header manipulation — as well as implement fine-grained control over monolithic systems like Shopify. 

Reverse proxies also streamline performance monitoring and enhance stability through techniques like load balancing.

Common Use Cases for Reverse Proxies in Ecommerce

From a strictly ecommerce standpoint, here is a quick rundown of the common use cases for reverse proxies:

• High-Traffic Event Scaling — Ecommerce websites often get too busy for comfort during events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other sales holidays. Similar to CDNs and edge delivery networks, a reverse proxy ensures traffic is efficiently distributed and catered to without bogging down your origin server. 
• Headless Commerce Support — Implementing headless architecture is a great way to future-proof your ecommerce website — creating personalized front-end experiences and unlocking virtually unlimited scalability. Reverse proxies are highly recommended to benefit from the upsides of headless while maintaining top-notch performance and security. 
• Personalization Without Slowdowns — Ecommerce personalization tactics, like AI-driven product recommendations and behavioral retargeting, take a toll on website performance. With a reverse proxy, you can mitigate the performance dip by handling the delivery of cached assets while the backend server focuses on more complicated, dynamic requests. 
• Geo-Targeted Content Delivery — Reverse proxies can be used to route traffic to a region-specific server, enabling location-based experience personalization. You can use this to highlight custom regional pricing, special offers, event promotions, and various types of local content while keeping your website running buttery-smooth. 
• Security Layer for Sensitive Transactions — Don't forget that one of the primary functions of a reverse proxy is to filter out bots and other types of malicious traffic before they even reach core systems. And in ecommerce, ensuring privacy and security is essential to building a reputation that customers want to transact with. 

Reverse Proxy vs CDN vs Load Balancer

Although reverse proxies, CDNs, and load balancers have functional overlaps, they're three fundamentally different concepts with unique benefits. 

To straighten things out, let's look into more detailed definitions and the tools associated with each solution: 

Reverse Proxy

At this point, we have already established that a reverse proxy is an intermediary server that sits just in front of web servers. It handles tasks like caching, routing, and SSL termination without your backend server's constant involvement. 

Tools for Reverse Proxy: Nginx, HAProxy, Caddy, and Traefik

Content Delivery Network (CDN) 

CDNs can also protect your website from brute force, DDoS, and other traffic-based attacks. But unlike a reverse proxy that's meant to be a single point of entry, a CDN leverages a web of geographically distributed servers designated to handle requests from nearby users. 

This makes CDNs highly effective in reducing latency and ensuring consistent website performance for a wider group of users. 

Tools for CDNs: Google Cloud CDN, Cloudflare, and Amazon CloudFront

Load Balancer

Lastly, a load balancer is a tool that's specifically designed to distribute traffic across multiple servers — keeping your backend as quick and efficient as possible. It makes perfect sense as an add-on for high-traffic websites (e.g., popular ecommerce websites and microservices), especially those that already use a CDN or other high-level traffic management system. 

Tools for Load Balancing: AWS Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, and Barracuda Load Balancer

Before we close this chapter, remember that reverse proxies, CDNs, and load balancers have overlaps because of one important reason: 

Reverse proxy is the foundational layer that supports all of them. 

In fact, a CDN actually relies on a network of reverse proxies — storing and delivering cached website data to users. Most load balancers, on the other hand, are reverse proxies that are specifically designed for distributing traffic. 

Note: Nostra AI also uses reverse proxy logic and takes edge delivery to the next level with AI and a robust network of over 300 servers. Learn more about the Edge Delivery Engine here!

How Reverse Proxies Power Performance at Scale 

Before we wrap things up, here's a quick recap of how reverse proxies can supercharge website performance at scale: 

• Speed drives revenue. Reverse proxies, with the help of technologies like edge delivery and smart caching, effectively deals with the problem of latency for high-traffic pages — especially for websites that cater to a global audience. The faster your website loads, the better the user experience and the higher your conversion rate.
• Traffic routing unlocks better personalization. A well-configured reverse proxy effectively distributes requests to the best-match backend server. This is useful for in-depth personalization without resulting in slowdowns. 
• Enterprise-scale control. With a centralized point of access for apps and websites, reverse proxies make it easier to take control of content delivery. It also streamlines traffic logging and analytics, getting you more consistent benchmarks for identifying improvement opportunities. 

Conclusion

Reverse proxies are the unsung heroes of modern ecommerce infrastructure — handling traffic, ensuring consistent performance, and keeping your backend secure. 

Above all, reverse proxies give businesses more flexibility and agility to keep up with modern customer expectations and constant, ever-evolving cybersecurity threats. 

Speed, scale, and security all start at the edge — and reverse proxies are where that edge begins. 

Want to leverage enterprise-grade reverse proxy performance without the dev overhead? 

Discover how Nostra Root ID uses cutting-edge infrastructure and AI to accelerate the entire customer experience. 

Click here to book a demo now!