Fix slow Cloudflare DNS propagation when migrating from Cloudflare Pages

Jarle Mathiesen

Jarle Mathiesen

— 1 min read

I recently moved my landing page https://www.youtubesummarized.com away from Cloudflare Pages.

For the change, I removed the custom domains, and added an A-record pointing to my server, and a CNAME record that would also direct www traffic to my server.

I was expecting some downtime doing this, but I wasn't prepared for waiting over an hour without anything happening.

After trying almost anything, I found out that the problem was having the cloudflare Proxy Status set to _enabled_ (the orange cloud in the DNS records) for the CNAME record.

By switching off the Cloudflare proxy, the CNAME DNS change propagated quickly.

The setup for switching should then be:

  • A-record: Proxy enabled, pointing to new server
  • CNAME record for `www`: Proxy disabled, pointing to root domain

It seems Cloudflare does some type of caching that can slow down propagation significantly when migrating away from CloudFlare Pages.

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