CDN & Caching

Cloudflare's CDN serves your content from data centres in 300+ cities, within about 50 milliseconds of most of the world's internet-connected population — cutting page load times and origin load simultaneously.

Overview

Every kilometre between a user and your server adds latency, and every request that reaches your origin costs compute and bandwidth. A content delivery network (CDN) fixes both by caching your content at the network edge, close to users, and serving it from there.

Cloudflare's CDN is integrated with its security stack: the same edge that caches your assets also terminates TLS, filters attacks and applies your rules, so there is no separate CDN vendor to chain in front of a security vendor. For most sites the practical results are faster pages, dramatically lower origin traffic, and resilience against both traffic spikes and origin outages.

Key capabilities

Static asset caching by default, with Cache Rules for fine-grained control over what is cached, where, and for how long
Tiered Cache, which funnels cache misses through upper-tier data centres to raise hit ratios and shield your origin
Argo Smart Routing (add-on) that routes requests over the fastest measured network paths
Full TLS termination with modern protocols — HTTP/2, HTTP/3/QUIC, 0-RTT — enabled from the edge
Compression (Brotli, gzip) and automatic protocol-level optimisations for all proxied traffic
Image optimisation: Polish for compression/format conversion (WebP/AVIF) and responsive resizing via Image Resizing
Cache Reserve (add-on) for persistent long-tail caching backed by R2 storage
Instant global purge — by URL, tag, hostname or everything — plus detailed cache analytics

How it works

When a user requests your site, anycast routing lands them at the nearest Cloudflare data centre. If the requested object is in that location's cache, it is served immediately — typically in tens of milliseconds. On a miss, with Tiered Cache enabled, the edge asks a designated upper-tier data centre before falling back to your origin; this hierarchy means an object fetched once from your origin can populate caches worldwide, and your origin sees a small fraction of total requests.

What gets cached is under your control. By default Cloudflare caches static file types and respects your origin's cache headers; Cache Rules let you override this — caching HTML for anonymous users, bypassing cache for logged-in sessions, setting distinct edge and browser TTLs per path. Purge is global and takes effect in seconds, so caching aggressively is safe even for frequently-updated content.

Dynamic, uncacheable traffic still benefits: TLS terminates near the user, connections to your origin are kept warm and reused, and Argo Smart Routing can carry the middle mile over the fastest currently-measured route rather than default BGP paths.

Plans & licensing

The core CDN is included on all plans, including Free, with unmetered bandwidth for normal web use. Pro adds Polish and more Page/Cache Rules; Business adds bypass-cache-on-cookie and custom SSL; Enterprise adds custom cache keys, higher purge-by-tag limits and dedicated support. Argo Smart Routing and Cache Reserve are usage-billed add-ons on any paid setup. As of 2026, subject to change — confirm current packaging with us.

Plan and pricing details reflect Cloudflare’s public packaging as of 2026 and are subject to change. Confirm current terms with us before making decisions based on them.

Deployment with Integrity

As a certified Cloudflare partner for Central and Eastern Europe, Integrity delivers this product end to end — including a free pilot so you see results on your own traffic before committing. A typical rollout:

Assessment. We profile your traffic: what is static, what is personalised, where your users are, and your current origin load and page speed metrics.
Free pilot. A zone goes behind Cloudflare with conservative defaults; we measure cache hit ratio and real-user latency before and after.
Cache policy. Cache Rules are written for your stack (including HTML caching where safe), Tiered Cache is enabled, and purge is integrated into your deploy pipeline.
Optimisation pass. Image optimisation, HTTP/3, compression and early hints are enabled and verified against Core Web Vitals.
Validation. We confirm logged-in flows, carts and APIs are never cached incorrectly, and load-test the origin offload.
Handover or managed service. Your team gets the configuration documented, or Integrity operates and iterates it — talk to us about the free pilot.

Ready to start? Contact us to arrange the free pilot.

FAQ

Can we cache HTML, or only images and scripts?

HTML caching is often the single biggest speed win and is fully supported via Cache Rules — the key is segmenting anonymous from logged-in traffic, typically by cookie. We design and test that segmentation during rollout.

What happens when we deploy new versions of our assets?

Use versioned asset filenames where possible, and trigger a targeted purge (by URL or cache tag) from your CI/CD pipeline for the rest. Purges propagate globally within seconds.

Does the CDN help if most of our content is dynamic and per-user?

Yes, though less dramatically: TLS terminates closer to users, HTTP/3 and connection reuse cut round trips, static subresources still cache, and Argo improves the middle mile. Typical dynamic sites still see meaningful TTFB improvements.