Minimize downtime
When making any change to the routing of an Internet application, there is always a possibility of downtime due to certificate issuance, misconfigured settings, or limitations at your origin server. To avoid downtime when going live, it's important to review the most common configurations.
Before activating your domain on Cloudflare (exact steps depend on your DNS setup), review the DNS records in your Cloudflare account.
With a new domain, make sure all your DNS records have a proxy status of DNS-only.
This setting prevents Cloudflare from proxying your traffic before you have an active edge certificate or before you have allowed Cloudflare IP addresses.
Take extra time to confirm the accuracy of your DNS records before activating your domain, paying special attention to:
- Zone apex records (
example.com) - Subdomain records (
www.example.comorblog.example.com) - Email records
If you add DNS records to your authoritative DNS provider between onboarding your domain and activating your domain, you may need to also add these records within Cloudflare.
Finish the DNS setup for your domain, moving the domain status to Active:
- Full setups: Update the authoritative nameservers at your registrar and wait for that change to be authenticated.
- Partial setups: Add the verification TXT record to your authoritative DNS and wait for that change to be authenticated.
Before proxying your traffic through Cloudflare, verify that Cloudflare has an active Edge Certificate for your domain.
For more details about timing and certificate recommendations, refer to Certificate issuance.
You may want to test your configuration using your local machine or proxying traffic from a development domain or subdomain.
If you experience issues, you should make sure that you have allowed Cloudflare IP addresses at your origin server.
Once you have verified that your SSL/TLS edge certificate is active and you have allowed Cloudflare IP addresses, change the proxy status of appropriate DNS records to Proxied.