Default cache behavior
Cloudflare respects the origin web server’s cache headers in the following order unless an Edge Cache TTL cache rule overrides the headers. Refer to the Edge TTL section for details on default TTL behavior.
- Cloudflare does not cache the resource when:
- The
Cache-Controlheader is set toprivate,no-store,no-cache, ormax-age=0. - The Set-Cookie header exists.
- The HTTP request method is anything other than a
GET.
- The
- Cloudflare does cache the resource when:
- The
Cache-Controlheader is set topublicandmax-ageis greater than 0. - The
Expiresheader is set to a future date.
- The
When Origin Cache Control is enabled on an Enterprise customer’s website, it indicates that Cloudflare should strictly respect Cache-Control directives received from the origin server. Free, Pro and Business customers have this feature enabled by default. For a list of directives and behaviors when Origin Cache-Control is enabled or disabled, refer to Cache-Control directives.
Cloudflare only caches based on file extension and not by MIME type. The Cloudflare CDN does not cache HTML or JSON by default. Additionally, by default Cloudflare caches a website's robots.txt.
| 7Z | CSV | GIF | MIDI | PNG | TIF | ZIP |
| AVI | DOC | GZ | MKV | PPT | TIFF | ZST |
| AVIF | DOCX | ICO | MP3 | PPTX | TTF | |
| APK | DMG | ISO | MP4 | PS | WEBM | |
| BIN | EJS | JAR | OGG | RAR | WEBP | |
| BMP | EOT | JPG | OTF | SVG | WOFF | |
| BZ2 | EPS | JPEG | SVGZ | WOFF2 | ||
| CLASS | EXE | JS | PICT | SWF | XLS | |
| CSS | FLAC | MID | PLS | TAR | XLSX |
To cache additional content, refer to Cache Rules to create a rule to cache everything.
Cloudflare’s CDN provides several cache customization options:
- Caching behavior for individual URLs via Cache Rules
- Customize caching with Cloudflare Workers
- Adjust caching level, cache TTL, and more via the Cloudflare Caching app
| Free | Pro | Business | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Availability | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Max upload size | 100 MB | 100 MB | 200 MB | 500+ MB |
If you require a larger upload, group requests smaller than the upload thresholds or upload the full resource through an unproxied (grey-clouded) DNS record.
Cloudflare cacheable file limits:
- Free, Pro and Business customers have a limit of 512 MB.
- For Enterprise customers the default maximum cacheable file size is 5 GB. Contact your account team to request a limit increase.
The connection status between visitors and Cloudflare can vary, affecting whether Cloudflare caches the content or not. If Cloudflare has already established a connection to the origin and started fetching the content, it will continue to retrieve and cache the entire content, even if the visitor disconnects midway. However, if a visitor disconnects before the origin responds to Cloudflare's request, no content will have been fetched yet, so Cloudflare will not start caching the content.