When using Cloudflare, many webmasters often believe that enabling Cloudflare will slow down their websites (especially in mainland China). This happens mainly because, for certain reasons, websites must be ICP registered to access Cloudflare’s China network.
However, many site owners don’t take full advantage of the CDN (Content Delivery Network).
As mentioned in the previous article about Cloudflare cache status, a website is considered successfully cached by Cloudflare only when the edge cache status shows “HIT.”
Cache status examples:
- Not Cached: Visitor → Cloudflare Edge → Origin Server → Cloudflare Edge → Visitor
- Cached: Visitor → Cloudflare Edge → Visitor
Clearly, requests that go back to the origin server increase latency — especially when the origin is located in mainland China, where routing can be inconsistent.
To optimize this, you can make use of one of the three free Page Rules in Cloudflare Free Plan:
- Create a rule for your domain (e.g.,
www.domain.com/*) - Set Edge Cache TTL to one month
- Change Cache Level to Cache Everything
This forces Cloudflare to cache your entire site at the edge, significantly reducing:
- Origin server bandwidth usage
- Server load
- User latency (especially for repeat visits)
In addition, webmasters can:
- Host their origin server in the United States
- Disable IPv6 in Cloudflare
- Or use the paid Argo Smart Routing service to reduce latency even further.
However, due to network throttling by local ISPs or Cloudflare’s global routing structure, most visitors from mainland China will still connect to Cloudflare’s California nodes, which is largely unavoidable.
Lastly, make good use of Cloudflare’s cache rules — you can extend caching to additional file types.
By default, Cloudflare only caches specific static file extensions. You can manually add more to improve performance and reduce origin requests.
Below is a list of cacheable file extensions:
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
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