CF-CACHE-STATUS showing BYPASS

Hi Team,

We have enabled all possible & suggested page rules for our wordpress website but still the header response in the browser shows cf-cache-status as “BYPASS”.

Is there anyway that we can find and fix this? It should be shown as “HIT” if I am not wrong.

We are new to this cloudflare & caching. Please help us !

Thanks
Shashikant

Check the response from your origin for the following headers, these need proper values:

Cache-Control
Expires

Additionally, the following headers have given me grief with CF in the past, they should not be present:

Set-Cookie

Hi @cuedo

Are there any specific values for these? Like these values are to be set from origin something like that?

Also, I am able to see for some links it’s HIT and for few others its BYPASS

Yes, you’ll want Cache-Control to be public, max-age=<large>, immutable or similar for static resources that are version tagged.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Cache-Control

The Expires header should match the same expiry.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Expires

If the Set-Cookie header is present in the response, then the cache can not cache the response because it would end up setting the cookie on every client. So in this case the CF cache will send BYPASS instead of HIT or EXPIRED.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Set-Cookie

If you need any more help, feel free to post your headers here and I’ll take a look at them for you and let you know if there’s anything out of the ordinary.

Hi @cuedo ,

Now we are able to see the cf-cache-status as “HIT” and for few resources its expired.

My hosting team has helped us in fixing the .htaccess file as they say that there were many redirections.

However, posting the current headers of network tab below. Kindly help us if we need to do anything further.


Thanks

Also, we are using WP Fastest Cache plugin on our website website along with this cloudflare caching.

Do you recommend enabling APO for better performance results?

Well your max-age value is in seconds, so those resources will be valid for around 6 months. It’s also worth noting that Cloudflare has many different cache zones and you won’t always get routed to the same zone. The caches are not shared between zones.

Hi @cuedo

So you mean the header seems to be fine or OK?

Do you suggest any further additional changes/settings to be done on our cloudflare account?

Also, please answer regarding APO. Do you recommend using APO of Cloudflare for a woocommerce website like ours.

Thanks

It looks fine to me, but you should look at the Cache utilization in your Cloudflare dashboard and aim for a high rate, i.e. 80%.

If the cache utilization is not very high, then it would be worth investigating further.

We can see that 65-68% of the served data is cached. Below are the screenshots for your reference.

Let us know if we can do anything more from the dashboard settings.

That seems reasonable, well done. You may consider setting an Edge Cache TTL for the catch-all at the bottom of a few minutes/hours if that makes sense for your website.

In any case, your Cloudflare is already performing very well.

Thanks for your positive revert.

We are actually confused on how this Edge Cache TTL will help us I mean setting it to which number (hours/minutes).

Can we put it to 1 day or something.

Ours is a woocommerce website with heavy traffic and changes are made almost once in 2-3 days

This is the minimum time that your page will be saved at the edge, and you may have no control to update it. You shouldn’t set this too large for a dynamic website. You might want to start with 4 hours.

Cool. Thanks

We have updated the Page rule of Cache everything with Edge Cache TTL at 4 hours.

Thanks for the help !

Can you please help us with one last thing here?

We could see a rapid improvement in the website speed & performance after enabling Cloudflare along with WP Fasted Cache plugin.

However, the product pages are still very slow at loading.

Do you recommend any specific settings or enabling APO?

It’s hard to say. If the origin is slow, then the pages will always be slow on first load. But after a while the caches will warm up and things might get faster.

Depending on the size of the site and the amount of traffic that it sees, the caches may not warm up fully before the content begins to expire.

If you need to speed up your origin, perhaps ask your plugin provider if there are any things you can do.

Yes Origin is comparitively slow. However, it’s much better than before. The load average also came down.

Just checking if APO can help us here as many people in this community have suggested that.

Yes, many have good results with APO. It uses Workers rather than Page Rules to optimize for Wordpress and you will have to install a plugin. If you need help installing APO, perhaps start a new thread and it will catch the attention of someone who uses APO often.

OK.

I will do that. Actually have seen & been following few threads on APO

Only was just worried if Woocommerce plugin is completely compatible or not as it’s a dynamic one.

Anyways let me check other resources too and enable that.

Thanks for your help !