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.

Proxied records

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.

Note

It may take longer than 5 minutes for you to actually experience record changes, as your local DNS cache may take longer to update.

Unproxied records

For DNS only records, you can choose a TTL between 30 seconds (Enterprise) or 60 seconds (non-Enterprise) and 1 day.

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