No specific error yet. I am proactively asking to avoid issues.
What is the error message?
No error message so far. I am preparing to migrate SSL and CDN setup.
What is the issue you’re encountering
I want to completely remove Cloudflare from my site (influencersgonewild.news) and instead use a WordPress plugin for SSL. I am worried about whether removing Cloudflare’s DNS records and services will cause downtime for my website.
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
Researched Cloudflare documentation.
Planned to update DNS directly with my hosting provider after removing Cloudflare.
Installed an SSL plugin in WordPress to manage SSL after removing Cloudflare.
What are the steps to reproduce the issue?
Set up a site using Cloudflare for DNS and SSL.
Decide to remove Cloudflare and use an alternative SSL method.
Plan to point DNS directly to the hosting provider.
Remove Cloudflare DNS records and disable Cloudflare services.
You should already have SSL on your origin, if not you’ve been running an insecure configuration.
Make sure all your required DNS records are set at your new DNS provider and your origin SSL is working and configured before doing anything else (set the Cloudflare SSL/TLS mode to “Full (strict)” to be sure).
Then you can change the Cloudflare DNS records to “DNS only”, requests will use Cloudflare for DNS but requests will go direct to your origin and not through Cloudflare (no caching will be in place so load on your server will increase if it is a busy site). If that works, then you can change the nameservers to those for the new DNS provider.
Make sure your Cloudflare zone is downgraded to a free plan if it is currently a paid one. Cloudflare will see the nameservers have moved away and automatically remove the zone from your account after 7 days and purge it after 14 days. Don’t delete DNS records from Cloudflare if you want to avoid downtime during the nameserver change.