If a logged-in dashboard, a shopping cart, or a submitted form result is showing stale or wrong content, the usual cause is Cloudflare caching a page it shouldn't. The fix lives in your portal, not on cloudflare.com: go to Cloudflare CDN under Goodies in the sidebar, pick the domain, and either turn Caching off for that domain or purge the cache after you fix the underlying issue. You manage this entirely from our portal. There is no separate cloudflare.com dashboard on our plans, and no per-record orange-cloud toggle, only a per-domain proxy and caching switch, as covered in find your way around the portal.
Why this happens
Cloudflare's cache sits in front of your server and serves matching requests without ever reaching your origin. That works well for a blog post or a product listing page that looks the same for every visitor. It's a different story for anything that's supposed to be different per visitor: an account dashboard, a cart total, a "thank you for your order" page, a logged-in nav bar, or a form confirmation screen. If Cloudflare cached one visitor's version of that page, the next visitor can get served the same cached copy instead of their own.
In practice this shows up as: a cart that shows someone else's items, a logged-in state that flickers back to logged-out, a form that appears to resubmit old data, or pricing that doesn't match what a visitor should see. None of this means your application is broken. It means a page that should never be cached, was.
What to check first
Open Cloudflare CDN in the sidebar, select the domain, and look at two toggles: Proxy and Caching. Both are on by default for hosted domains. Proxy routes traffic through Cloudflare; caching is what actually stores copies of pages. If you're chasing a stale-content bug, caching is the one to look at:
- If the affected pages are a small, identifiable part of the site (checkout, account, login), turn Caching off for the domain.
- If most of the site is fine and only a handful of pages misbehave after a deploy or a content change, use Purge cache instead. That clears everything Cloudflare currently has stored, so the next request pulls a fresh copy from your server.
Purge is the right move right after you've fixed something (updated a page, corrected a product price, deployed new code) and want visitors to stop seeing the old version. Turning caching off is the right move when a whole class of pages is dynamic by nature and shouldn't be cached at all.
Application-level caching is separate
Cloudflare caching isn't the only layer that can hold onto stale content. If your hosting uses LiteSpeed Cache (the default on our WordPress installs) or a page-caching plugin, that layer sits between your application and Cloudflare, and it has its own rules for excluding logged-in users, carts, and forms. Many caching plugins have built-in exclusion rules for cart and checkout pages on common platforms. If you're seeing stale content and Cloudflare caching is already off or purged, check the plugin's exclusion rules next, since the two caches can mask or compound each other.
For a full walkthrough of every other Cloudflare setting on that page, SSL/TLS mode, security level, Always Use HTTPS, and the rest, see every Cloudflare setting explained.
When to contact support
If you've turned off caching or purged and a logged-in page, cart, or form is still showing content that doesn't belong to the current visitor, open a ticket from Support → New ticket in the portal. That's a real person, not a bot, and they can check whether the issue is at the Cloudflare layer, the application layer, or something else entirely. Mention exactly which page is affected and whether it happens for every visitor or only some, that detail narrows it down fast.