Time to Live (TTL)
Time to Live (TTL) is a field on DNS records that controls how long each record is cached and — as a result — how long it takes for record updates to reach your end users.
Longer TTLs speed up DNS lookups ↗ by increasing the chance of cached results, but a longer TTL also means that updates to your records take longer to go into effect.
By default, all proxied records have a TTL of Auto, which is set to 300 seconds.
Since only IP resolution records can be proxied, this setting ensures that queries to your domain name resolve fairly quickly. This setting also means that any changes to proxied A, AAAA, or CNAME records will take place within five minutes or less.
For DNS only records, you can choose a TTL between 30 seconds (Enterprise) or 60 seconds (non-Enterprise) and 1 day.
Nameserver TTL is a separate feature and only affects Cloudflare nameservers and custom nameservers. For other NS records on your DNS records table, TTL is controlled by their respective TTL fields.