What gets stored and for how long.
THE CACHING LEVEL SETTING
Standard, which treats different query strings as different files. This is the sensible default.
No query string, which caches only requests without parameters.
Ignore query string, which serves the same cached file regardless of parameters. This breaks anything using parameters meaningfully.
Leave it on Standard unless you have a specific reason.
BROWSER CACHE TTL
How long visitors' browsers keep files before asking again.
Longer is faster for returning visitors and slower to update. A few days to a month suits most static assets.
EDGE CACHE TTL
How long Cloudflare keeps a file before asking us again.
Set through page rules or cache rules rather than globally.
WHAT IS CACHED
Static file types by extension. HTML is not, by default.
DEVELOPMENT MODE
Temporarily bypasses cache entirely for three hours. Useful while making changes.
Remember it expires; people enable it, forget, and wonder why the site is slower.
THE PRACTICAL SETUP
Standard caching level, a reasonable browser TTL, and server-side caching enabled on our end.
