Get started
Smart Shield reduces the load on your origin server and improves content delivery by consolidating requests through Cloudflare's caching infrastructure. It is available to all customers as an opt-in configuration.
- You must have a Cloudflare account and onboard your domain.
- Verify that DNS records for the domain you want to protect are set to proxied. Smart Shield operates within Cloudflare's reverse proxy, so traffic from DNS-only records is not routed through it.
- Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard ↗, and select your account and domain.
- Go to Speed > Smart Shield.
- (Optional) Explore the different available packages.
- Select Get started for free or choose a different package and select Continue to proceed to the guided onboarding flow.
After setup, you can monitor origin performance and cache effectiveness through the Observatory dashboard.
Pro, Business, and Enterprise customers have access to Health Checks for monitoring origin availability across all packages.
The base package for reducing origin load through caching and connection optimization.
- Includes Smart Tiered Cache and Connection Reuse.
Adds network path optimization on top of the base package. Use when visitors are geographically distant from the origin server.
- Includes Smart Tiered Cache, Connection Reuse, and Argo Smart Routing.
The full package with additional caching customization through regional and persistent storage options.
- Includes Smart Tiered Cache, Connection Reuse, Argo Smart Routing, Regional Tiered Cache, and Cache Reserve.