Edge Network
Hello! What is the name of the Cloudflare service that pre-loads our sites files across all Cloudflare nodes for the fastest CDN? A competitor calls it the 'Edge Network' and 'Smart Caching' but I know they are just using Cloudflare to make Shopify sites go from ~40 performance score to ~85+
Thank you!
4 Replies
Preloads? Across All Cloudflare Nodes? No such feature exists as far as I know. Cloudflare has some 350+ locations and 500+ specific colocations (space in datacenters, local cache is per colocation "colo"), thousands of machines, that would be crazy expensive if it did exist
There's an Enterprise feature called Prefetch URLs: https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/prefetch-urls/
Can add prefetch links in the http response headers and CF will fetch them to cache for the specific location the request came from
Prefetch URLs · Cloudflare Speed docs
URL prefetching means that Cloudflare pre-populates the cache with content a visitor is likely to request next. This setting — when combined with …
There's a lot of Cloudflare features which will cache at each Cloudflare colo if the item is requested. For example, Cloudflare KV, normal cache, etc. If you have enough traffic you could get your site cached globally.
There's also Enterprise-only Tiered Caching Topologies, letting you have multiple layers of cache which can help with cache %
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/how-to/tiered-cache/
i.e Each Request would go Visitor (let's say, New York) -> Local CF Cache (New York) -> Regional CF Cache (maybe Chicago, ORD) -> Upper CF Cache (let's say West Coast) -> Origin
Lots of chances to hit cache without having to go all the way to the origin, which can help espec in far away regions
Super interesting, thank you for the information @Chaika