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-Control header is set to private, no-store, no-cache, or max-age=0.
  • The Set-Cookie header exists.
• Cloudflare does cache the resource when:
  • The Cache-Control header is set to public and max-age is greater than 0.
  • The Expires header is set to a future date.

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.

​​ Default cached file extensions

Cloudflare only caches based on file extension and not by MIME type. The Cloudflare CDN does not cache HTML by default. Additionally, Cloudflare caches a website’s robots.txt.

To cache additional content, refer to Cache Rules to create a rule to cache everything.

​​ Customization options and limits

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

​​ Upload limits

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.

​​ Cacheable size limits

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.

​​ When does Cloudflare cache successfully?

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.