How long does it take to cache site?

When the CDN gets enabled for a domain, how long does it take before I will start to see the CF header? IT enabled CDN about 4 hours ago, from what I can tell in all the documentation I’ve been reading, it is instantaneous, but I cannot find a real answer to this question. Do I need to wait 24 hours to see those headers and get a better grade at webpagetest.org?

If you are waiting for the nameservers to update and propagate that depends on the registrar (but should be relatively fast). If you are simply toggling between :grey: and :orange: it should be instant.

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Once you enabled Cloudflare, I mean two things by word enable.

  1. At Dashboard, it shows Active (Green Color)
  2. At DNS tab, your domain A record, and CNAME www should have Orange color.

Hope it is clear.

Now how much time Cloudflare take to Cache? In my experience, approx 30-60 seconds after first request (MISS). Then from second request it will show HIT means it is served from Cloudflare Cache.

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Oh boy, well that must mean it doesn’t work at all for the website it was set up for. I am the programmer so I don’t have access to Cloudflare, those requests have to go through IT, so if it didn’t show the CF headers pretty much right away, it doesn’t work right? Is there any reason that turning the CDN on for a site wouldn’t work correctly? The IT guy that set it up says he did a lot of research and the set up looks correct, but I can’t look at it myself to check. I appreciate any help explaining how this is supposed to work.

Once you should check by IP lookup.

How does Cloudflare works, please have a look at this article to understand.

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/205177068-Step-1-How-does-Cloudflare-work-

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Ping your site’s public IP address and see if you’re getting back a Cloudflare IP instead of your own, then you at least know if you are being proxied by Cloudflare or not. You could have other stuff in your environment which is stripping the haders prior to hitting your code, for example.