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Prepare for surges or spikes in web traffic

Use Cloudflare Cache features to optimize caching

By default, Cloudflare caches static content such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. However, you can extend Cloudflare caching to work with HTML by creating custom Cache Rules.

Cache more requests

  1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard ↗, and select your account and domain.

  2. Go to Caching > Cache Rules and select Create rule.

  3. For When incoming requests match, enter either your entire website or a specific path on your application, based on the Hostname or URI Path. Refer to the available fields.

  4. For Cache eligibility, define how these requests should be cached and for how long. Refer to the available cache eligibility settings.

  5. You can then monitor the effectiveness of your cache settings using Cache Analytics and update your configuration according to our Cache performance guide.

Advanced cache optimizations

  • Custom Cache Keys allows you to precisely set the cacheability setting for any resource.

  • Origin Cache Control can be used to let the Cache-Control headers tell Cloudflare how to handle content from the origin server.

Use Tiered Cache

Tiered Cache uses the size of Cloudflare's network to reduce requests to customer origin servers by dramatically increasing cache hit ratios.

It works by dividing Cloudflare's data centers into a hierarchy of lower-tiers and upper-tiers. If content is not cached in lower-tier data centers (generally the ones closest to a visitor), the lower-tier requests an upper-tier for the content. If the upper-tier does not have the content, only the upper-tier will initiate a request to the origin. This practice improves bandwidth efficiency by limiting the number of Cloudflare data centers that can ask the origin for content.

Refer to Enable Tiered Cache to get started.

Use Cache Reserve

Cache Reserve is a large, persistent data store implemented on top of R2.

With a single click in the dashboard, your cacheable content will be written to Cache Reserve. In the same way that Tiered Cache builds a hierarchy of caches between your visitors and your origin, Cache Reserve serves as the ultimate upper-tier cache that will reserve storage space for your assets for as long as you want.

This ensures that your content is served from cache longer, shielding your origin from unneeded egress fees.

Understand the limits of your hosting plan

Cloudflare offsets most of the load to your website via caching and request filtering, but some traffic will still pass through to your origin. Knowing the limits of your hosting plan can help prevent a bottleneck from your host. 

Once you are aware of your plan limits, you can use Rate Limiting to restrict how many times a requesting entity can make a request to your website.

To help you define the best rate limiting setting for your use case, refer to How Cloudflare determines the request rate article.

Cloudflare Waiting Room

Cloudflare Waiting Room allows you to route excess users of your website to a customized waiting room, helping preserve customer experience and protect origin servers from being overwhelmed with requests.

Use Cloudflare IP addresses to your advantage

Take action to prevent attacks to your application during peak season by configuring your firewall to only accept traffic from Cloudflare IP addresses. By only allowing Cloudflare IPs ↗, you can prevent attackers from bypassing Cloudflare and sending requests directly to your origin.

Refer to Cloudflare IP addresses for more information.

Monitor traffic in your Cloudflare dashboard

You can use the Cloudflare dashboard to closely monitor the traffic on your domain and fine-tune your cache and security settings accordingly.

Zone and Account analytics

Cloudflare zone analytics gives you access to a wide range of metrics, collected at the website or domain level.

Cloudflare account analytics lets you access a wide range of aggregated metrics from all the sites under a specific Cloudflare account.

Security Analytics and Security Events

Security Analytics displays information about all incoming HTTP requests for your domain, including requests not handled by Cloudflare security products.

You can also use the Security Events to review mitigated requests and tailor your security configurations.

Cache Analytics

You can use Cache Analytics to improve site performance or reduce origin web server traffic. Cache Analytics helps determine if resources are missing from cache, expired, or ineligible for caching.