Serving a cached copy when your site is down.
WHAT IT DOES
If our server is unreachable, Cloudflare serves a cached copy of your pages rather than an error.
WHEN IT HELPS
A brief outage, where visitors see content instead of a failure.
Better than nothing, and it maintains the impression that the business exists.
WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
Make the site functional. Forms do not submit, checkout does not work, and nothing dynamic behaves.
It serves a snapshot.
THE RISK
A visitor may see outdated content and believe it current.
On a shop, someone could see a product that is no longer available or priced differently.
WHETHER TO ENABLE IT
For a brochure site, yes. Content served during an outage is better than an error page.
For a shop, consider carefully. A customer attempting to buy from a cached page and failing is a worse experience than a clear error.
WHAT IT IS NOT
A substitute for reliable hosting or for backups.
It covers a short outage. It is not a failover arrangement.
