Cloudflare Always Online: What it is & How To Set it Up

Even a website that is working as you want can suffer an unexpected outage.

If your hosting provider’s server goes down, preparation can only do so much. You have limited ways to bring the site back online yourself.

Cloudflare backs up your site against unexpected web server downtime by caching and delivering pages. This keeps a version online even when parts of the site stop working.

The setup instructions follow below. Click here to skip to them.

An error page will quickly drive visitors away from your website.

When your business depends on functions your website provides, you cannot afford an outage.

Turning on Cloudflare Always Online creates a cache for each page, adding a backup to your site’s infrastructure.

When a visitor connects while your web server is offline, Cloudflare delivers the cached page.

The cached pages may have limited functionality, but customers can still read your home page and other site content.

Include the services your team depends on in your outage plan. For an Australian brokerage using an AI policy assistant for mortgage brokers, that means checking whether staff can submit a policy question and receive an answer. A cached information page does not establish that the interactive service is available.

Is Always Online Included In My Cloudflare Plan?

Every Cloudflare plan, including the free plan, includes access to Cloudflare Always Online.

The frequency of Cloudflare’s backup checks depends on your plan. It takes snapshots every two weeks on free plans and every six days on pro plans. The top plans receive snapshots every other day.

These crawls appear in your Cloudflare server logs, but they do not update the Always Online cache.

Free users receive cache updates every 30 days, pro customers every 15 days and higher-tier customers every five days.

How Does Always Online Work?

Always Online provides a backup within Cloudflare. Cloudflare also keeps extra backups elsewhere to help keep your site available.

When Cloudflare cannot serve its cached pages, it uses the Internet Archive to store additional backups and retrieve them as needed.

Cloudflare sends your site’s busiest pages to the Internet Archive’s online collection.

Visitors may see an error page if neither Cloudflare nor the Archive can display a backup, or if the backup has a problem.

Your site will not literally remain online forever, but IA is among the world’s most reliable archives. You can depend on it to back up content when your web hosting fails.

Cloudflare disables Always Online by default because the feature is still in beta.

1. Log In & Pick Your Domain

Sign in to Cloudflare, then select the domain where you want to enable Always Online.

2. Navigate To Your Cache Configuration And Activate

From the Cloudflare dashboard, open Caching and select Configuration.

Find Always Online Beta further down the page and turn on its switch.

3. Update Your Cache To The Internet Archive

Creating the first cache is optional. If your site has no privacy concerns about regulated data, click the blue Update button to create it on the Internet Archive.

To enable Always Online for individual URLs instead of your entire domain, use Cloudflare page rules.

You can also set a manual server rule that delivers cached pages in the same way, without enabling the beta feature.

Leave Always Online disabled for your domain and follow this Cloudflare support guide to configure origin cache control for the pages you want backed up.

Use a stale-if-error directive to deliver cached content when a request tries to reach an offline link on your site.