Enable Cloudflare Features One at a Time

[marvin4]

What is the name of the domain?

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What is the issue you’re encountering

It’s hard to understand all the implications of turning on Cloudflare proxying.

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I have a handful of domains that I’ve moved to Cloudflare DNS and for which I’m planning to enable Cloudflare proxying. I’ve turned on proxying for one of the less important of these as a test, with a rule in place to disable all caching.

So far, so good, at least as far as I can tell. However, it’s difficult to discover all the behaviors that may change when proxying is enabled, and I have not come away from my test run confident that I understand everything that is happening.

Ideally, I would like to enable Cloudflare’s features piecemeal, so that I could review each in turn to confirm that each works as expected — but there does not seem to be a way to do that. It seems that what I will have to do instead is disable features manually when possible and then re-enable them one at a time — and for those which can’t be disabled, review them en masse when proxying is enabled. But first I will need to understand what those features are.

In addition to exploring the Cloudflare dashboard web UI, I have read some of the Getting Started Learning Path documentation, performed web searches, and consulted AI, but I have yet to find any definitive resource enumerating everything that I need to watch out for when proxying is enabled.

[i40west]

If your site is working, with SSL/TLS, then turning on the proxy should Just Work. It won’t cache your HTML by default because that’s often not static, and in your case you are using Wordpress so that’s almost certainly what you want (not caching HTML). It will cache your static resources. Your CSS appears to be using hashed filenames, so no problem there. Your images aren’t using hashed filenames, so if you upload a new version of an image with the exact same filename, you may have to manually clear the cache for the change to be picked up.

The one thing to look out for is that, for some reason, Cloudflare still defaults to “Flexible” SSL mode, which can cause a redirect loop if you’re redirecting HTTP to HTTPS, which you are. I’d recommend immediately changing the SSL mode to “Full strict” in the Cloudflare dashboard to avoid this problem.

Basically, enabling the proxy should be fine, and of course you can shut it back off again if needed.

You can make the whole thing even easier with Cloudflare’s APO plugin (A Wordpress plugin that enables more integration between Wordpress and Cloudflare). This is not a free service and is not necessary to make your site work.