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.
  • The HTTP request method is anything other than a GET.
• 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.

Note

Cloudflare does cache the resource even if there is no Cache-Control header based on status codes.

Note

If both max-age and an Expires header are set, max-age will be used by Cloudflare.

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 or JSON by default. Additionally, by default Cloudflare caches a website’s robots.txt.

7Z	CSV	GIF	MIDI	PNG	TIF	ZIP
AVI	DOC	GZ	MKV	PPT	TIFF	ZST
AVIF	DOCX	ICO	MP3	PPTX	TTF
APK	DMG	ISO	MP4	PS	WEBM
BIN	EJS	JAR	OGG	RAR	WEBP
BMP	EOT	JPG	OTF	SVG	WOFF
BZ2	EPS	JPEG	PDF	SVGZ	WOFF2
CLASS	EXE	JS	PICT	SWF	XLS
CSS	FLAC	MID	PLS	TAR	XLSX

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

	Free	Pro	Business	Enterprise
Availability	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Max upload size	100 MB	100 MB	200 MB	500+ MB

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.