Purging the Cloudflare cache (and when to)

If you changed something on your site and it's still not showing up after a hard refresh, purge the Cloudflare cache from your service page. Go to your service in the portal, open the Manage CDN page, and click Purge cache. This clears the cached copies of your pages and assets sitting at Cloudflare's edge, so the next visitor request pulls a fresh copy from your origin server.

Purging isn't always the fix, though. Your site's speed comes from multiple cache layers stacked on top of each other, and the one holding your old content might not be Cloudflare at all. Knowing the order matters more than knowing the button.

The three cache layers, in order

A page you're viewing may be cached in up to three places between your origin server and your eyes:

• Your browser. Browsers cache pages and assets locally based on the response headers they received. A hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) or an incognito window bypasses this.
• LSCache, at the server. We run LiteSpeed Web Server with LSCache on shared and WordPress hosting, a full-page cache that serves pages from memory without touching PHP. On WordPress installs, the LiteSpeed Cache plugin talks to LSCache and normally clears the relevant pages automatically when you publish or update content. See How we make your site fast for the full stack.
• Cloudflare, at the edge. If proxy mode is on for your domain, Cloudflare keeps its own cached copies of static assets (and sometimes full pages, depending on your caching settings) at edge locations close to your visitors. This is the layer the Purge cache button clears.

A change that isn't showing up is stuck in one of these three. Work backwards from your browser: rule out local caching first, then check whether LSCache or Cloudflare is holding the old version.

When a Cloudflare purge is actually the fix

Purge from Manage CDN when:

• Proxy mode is on for the domain (check the toggle on the same page) and you updated static assets like images, CSS, or JS that visitors in other regions are still seeing old versions of.
• You changed DNS-adjacent settings like SSL/TLS mode or redirect rules and want the effect to apply immediately rather than waiting for cached responses to expire.
• You've already ruled out browser and LSCache as the source, and the content is still stale for other people, not just you.

If proxy mode is off for the domain, Cloudflare is only serving DNS for you, not caching your pages, and purging the CDN cache will do nothing. In that case the stale content is either your browser or LSCache. See Setting up a CDN with Cloudflare for how proxy mode works and when it's worth turning on.

What purge doesn't fix

If the page is genuinely not loading (a blank screen, a server error, or the domain not resolving at all), that's not a caching issue and a purge won't help. A domain that won't resolve at all is usually DNS, not cache. See Fixing DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN if that's what you're seeing.

Development mode: the 3-hour bypass

If you're actively making changes and don't want to purge after every single edit, turn on Development Mode on the Cloudflare CDN page instead. It bypasses Cloudflare's cache entirely for that domain, every request goes straight to your origin, for three hours. It turns itself back off automatically after the window closes, so you don't need to remember to disable it.

Development Mode is the better tool during active work: purge is a one-time clear, Development Mode is a standing bypass while you iterate. Switch back to normal caching once you're done, or just let the three hours run out.

A purge doesn't undo a redirect or a DNS record

Purging clears cached content, it doesn't change what Cloudflare or your server will do next. If you set up a redirect and it's pointing the wrong place, or a DNS record has the wrong value, purging the cache won't touch either of those. Fix the redirect rule itself (see Redirecting URLs on your site) or the record in DNS Zone Editor, then purge if you still need to clear a cached copy of the old behavior.

When to contact support

If you've purged, waited a few minutes for the change to take effect, checked that proxy mode matches what you expect, and the old content is still showing, open a ticket from Support in the portal. Include the URL and what you changed. It's a fast check for our team to confirm whether something's stuck at the edge versus somewhere else in the chain.