Cloudflare Compatibility

If you are using Cloudflare, you must make several tweaks so that Groundhogg and other highly dynamic WordPress plugins work as expected.

Set Max Browser Cache TTL

The max TTL is, "the amount of time that cache resources are used before they are re-cached with more recent data." For WordPress, the recommended maximum is 12 hours, but we recommend 4 hours.

Exclude WP Admin

Interestingly enough, Cloudflare in many cases does not exclude the /wp-admin/ by default. And it must be excluded manually.

Set the URL to the root of your WP Admin area and add an asterisk to make it match all pages.

For the settings select Cache Level and then select Bypass.

Exclude Managed Page

You must exclude the Groundhogg managed page, which is where several frontend parts of Groundhogg are displayed. Like the email preferences center.

The URL to exclude is yoursite.com/gh/*

Exclude the Groundhogg REST API

Groundhogg uses the REST API for fetching dynamic content in the backend all the time. Cloudflare will often cache the responses making them unusable. Please exclude the REST API ENDPOINT from caching.

The URL to exclude is yoursite.com/wp-json/gh/*

Exclude all Cron files

You should also exclude the various cron-job URLs for Groundhogg, WordPress, and our extensions like the AWS extension.

Note: When using a free version of Cloudflare, you're limited to 3-page rules, and you need more than 3 for Groundhogg. However, you can go to Caching -> Cache Rules and there are 10 cache rules available, and you can make the necessary rules to bypass Cloudflare caching there.