How to Temporarily Pause Cloudflare CDN on Your Site?

Cloudflare offers powerful CDN and WAF solutions to protect your site. However, at times you will face problems with their caching or security rules that may block real users and search engine bots. In general, you can purge the caching of entire site or single page to check if that resolves your problem. If not, the next solution is to temporarily pause Cloudflare setup on your site instead of changing DNS servers. This is super easy and here is how you can do that.

Pause Cloudflare on Your Site

• Login to your Cloudflare account and select the site that you want to pause.
• This will take you to “Overview” section on the dashboard. Check the right sidebar to find “Quick Actions” links.
• Scroll down to the bottom on the right sidebar where you can find “Advanced Actions” section.
• Click the “Pause Cloudflare on Site” link.

• You will see a confirmation pop-up showing the details and click “Confirm” to pause the setup.

• After that, you will see the information message showing on top of the “Overview” section that the site is paused.

Resume Cloudflare After Pausing

After fixing your issues, simply go back to Cloudflare account “Overview” section. Check under “Advanced Actions” on the right sidebar and you will see “Enable Cloudflare on Site” option. Click on that link and activate the setup again.

What Happens When You Pause Cloudflare?

Here is what happens when you pause:

• Site will continue to work through Cloudflare nameservers (DNS setup).
• However, the content will be fetched directly from your hosting server thus revealing the IP address of the hosting servers.
• This means, cached content from Cloudflare will not be used. Hence, you can use pausing option for troubleshooting when you have problems with caching.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF) and SSL protections from Cloudflare will be disabled. The requests to webpages on your site will be directly served through the SSL of your server.

Alternate Options for Pausing

There are few things you can consider instead of pausing depending upon your need:

If you want to use SSL and WAF while disabling caching, then the best option is to use “Developer Mode” instead of pausing the site. For that, check the top “Quick Actions” section on the right sidebar and turn on “Developer Mode” option.

For deleting the cache, click on “Purge Cache” link or go to “Caching > Configuration” section from left sidebar. Click “Purge Everything” button to delete all cached content in Cloudflare. Otherwise, click on “Custom Purge” button and delete single pages or sections on your site.

Finally, if you really wanted to get rid of Cloudflare, then click the “Remove Site from Cloudflare” link. This is shown just below the “Pause Cloudflare on Site” option on “Overview” section’s right sidebar. You should change the nameservers of your domain to point to another CDN or to your hosting server. In this case, DNS propagation will take couple of days and your site will be down on some geographical locations while up and working on other locations.