Cloudflare

Cloudflare

Manages exactly one Cloudflare Cache Rule and purges exact URLs. Everything works on the Free plan — no Workers, no APO subscription.

Off by default. Connect under Cloudflare.

Credentials

Two modes:

• API token (recommended). Needs Zone → Cache Rules → Edit (permission group "Cache Settings Write"), plus Zone → Read and Zone → Cache Purge.
• Global API Key with the account email. Legacy; the token is narrower and safer.

Credentials are encrypted at rest in the options table. They can instead be supplied in wp-config.php, which takes precedence:

define( 'GTPERF_CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN', '…' );
define( 'GTPERF_CLOUDFLARE_DOMAIN', 'example.com' );

See Constants Reference.

The managed rule

GT Performance compiles your bypass policy — paths, cookies, query parameters, plus everything the active commerce adapters declare — into a single Cloudflare rule expression. It owns that one rule and leaves every other rule alone.

The rule compiler has to fit inside Cloudflare Free's rule-length and rule-count budget. When the compiled expression would exceed it, the plugin says so rather than truncating the expression, because a truncated bypass rule is exactly how a checkout page ends up cached at the edge.

Preview before you sync. The Cloudflare tab renders the exact expression it will send. Read it, then synchronize.

Purging

Exact-URL purge on Cloudflare Free. Triggered automatically when a content change requires an edge purge, and manually from the admin or CLI:

wp gt-performance cloudflare purge --page-url=https://example.com/some-post/
wp gt-performance cloudflare sync
wp gt-performance cloudflare diagnose

Connection diagnostics

diagnose walks each stage separately — token validity, zone resolution, ruleset read, rule write, purge — and reports which one failed. This matters because Cloudflare returns the same generic rejection for a token missing any of several permissions; the per-stage result tells you which permission is actually absent.

Edge ownership

If your host already runs its own Cloudflare layer, two systems editing cache behaviour is a reliable way to produce inexplicable results. GT Performance detects xCloud's Cloudflare Enterprise add-on and refuses to also manage a rule, reporting the conflict instead. See xCloud.

A caveat worth knowing

On a site behind a host-managed Cloudflare layer, cloudflare purge may report success while the copy actually being served to visitors is held by the host's layer, not the zone your token addresses. Verify with a cache-busting query string and check for x-gt-cache: BYPASS rather than re-fetching the bare URL, and purge from the host's dashboard when the two layers disagree.

Related

CDN · xCloud · Commerce Safety · Diagnostics