CDN and Caching
Cloudflare's CDN (Content Delivery Network) is one of the largest in the world, spanning 330+ cities globally. It stores copies of your website's static content at edge locations closest to your visitors, dramatically reducing latency and offloading traffic from your origin server.
Why This Matters
A CDN can reduce your page load time by 50–80% for static assets. Cloudflare's CDN is free and active by default on every proxied domain.
How Cloudflare CDN Works
What You Will Learn
| Lesson | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| CDN and Cache Fundamentals | How the CDN works, what gets cached, Cache-Control headers, and cache purging |
| Speed Brain | Prefetch acceleration for faster page navigation |
| Cache Rules | Modern, granular caching policies — per path, cookie, header, or country (10 free) |
| Page Rules (Legacy) | The older per-URL rule system, common patterns, and full migration guide |
| Tiered Cache | Hierarchical caching that shields your origin and increases cache HIT ratios globally |
| Cache Reserve | Persistent R2-backed cache layer that eliminates evictions for long-tail content (paid) |
| Cache Configuration | Zone-wide settings: Caching Level, Browser Cache TTL, Purge, Dev Mode, Always Online, and more |
Prerequisites
- Domain added to Cloudflare with proxied DNS records (Module 1)
- Basic understanding of HTTP headers