In a short period of time, Cloudflare Pages proved to be a highly competitive and solid solution vastly for its integration with other features the company has to offer.

Always Online

Cloudflare offers at least two options to mitigate the possible availability issue. One of which is Always Online which takes snapshots for Wayback Machine. In case segments of Cloudflare responsible for Pages, experience technical issues, Always Online will save the day.

Cf3

Always Online is available under Configuration section in Caching menu of a site area.

Cache Everything and Edge Cache TTL

Static resources that are served with Cloudflare Pages are not cached by default. To check the status of the resource you will need to look at the CF-Cache-Status response header.

DYNAMIC cache response does not consider the asset to be eligible for cache so the page was requested from the Pages service. To benefit from caching we added Cache Level and Edge Cache TTL settings in Page Rules.

The DYNAMIC cache response does not consider the asset to be eligible for caching, so the page was requested from the Pages service. To benefit from caching we added the Cache Level and  Edge Cache TTL settings in Page Rules.

Cache Everything with  * matches pattern instructs Cloudflare to cache all static assets as well as dynamic parts, so be sure to set Bypass to any page with forms.

Edge Cache TTL is basically a setting that controls the period of time before the edge servers invalidate the cache and request a new copy of the upstream. With this option enabled, Cloudflare will overwrite all headers sent by the upstream.

If Pages encounters any availability issues, the site will be served from the edge cache (assuming it has not been invalidated), hence the second mitigation option.

Redirects

Sometimes, sites undergo a content reorganization: a URL slug is changed or a set of entries is moved to a new section. If links to the blog were published somewhere on the Internet, it makes sense to make sure that visitors do not receive a 404, unless it is intentional. At the moment, Cloudflare Pages supports the basic set of redirect messages with an _redirects file within the project. It's a simple way to avoid losing traffic.

URL rewriting, header modification, even HTTP GET query string manipulation is available in the domain menu section. The only downside is that you can only have three page rules and two transformation rules at the free level.

As you can see, Cloudflare does all the heavy lifting: it scans the HTML for email addresses and serves sanitized pages to what appear to be bots.

Built-in Analytics

All Pages projects provide one-click activation of ethical web analytics. While not as sophisticated as Google Analytics, it is sufficient to get the basic data. 

Cf2

Auto Minify and Brotli

Combined with Brotli compression, the final size of assets can be reduced by almost 89% - the end result is a compressed style.css with just two mouse clicks!

Other nice out of the box features

While the advantages may not be obvious with a high-speed connection, it shows superior performance on limited connections. The protocol is currently a draft, which means it does not have wide adoption on smartphones that suffer most from packet loss.

The bot-fighting mode is exceptionally useful for many projects. It may become useful again once a commenting system is added.

And to conclude, the more feature-rich the platform is, the better it will adapt to your future needs. Therefore, Workers and Workers KV are good choices for hacks where static site generator capabilities will be limited.

 

Give it a try, it's FREE for small and medium projects! CloudFlare CDN