How to turn off Cloudflare temporarily for maintenance or development

Cloudflare places a proxy between the server and your visitors. This is not always suitable when using a network testing tool or developing a site. This article describes two ways to turn off Cloudflare.

Turning off Cloudflare entirely

When you want to route traffic directly to your site's web server, you should disable Cloudflare. Doing so ensures that the Cloudflare proxy is not used. To turn off Cloudflare, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Cloudflare with your Cloudflare account.
2. In the left sidebar, click Websites, and then click your domain name (for example, example.com):

   

3. In the right sidebar, under Advanced Actions, click Pause Cloudflare on Site, and then click Confirm:
   

   

4. To re-enable Cloudflare, in the right sidebar, under Advanced Actions, click Enable Cloudflare on Site:
   

   

Turning on Development Mode

When you are making changes to your site, you can enable Development Mode. Traffic to your server is routed through Cloudflare, but caching is turned off and you can see changes to your site immediately.

To enable Development Mode, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Cloudflare with your Cloudflare account.
2. In the left sidebar, click Websites, and then click your domain name (for example, example.com):

   

3. In the right sidebar, under Quick Actions, click the Development Mode slider:
   

   

   Development Mode turns off automatically after three hours. If you are making changes that take longer than three hours, you must turn it on again.

4. To disable Development Mode, in the right sidebar, under Quick Actions, click the Development Mode slider again:
   

   

More Information

For more information about Cloudflare, please visit https://www.cloudflare.com.