How to Disable Cloudflare Speed Brain

Cloudflare recently rolled out a beta feature called “Speed Brain“. This feature is meant to speed the loading of navigation links up, but Speed Brain may potentially cause issues with WordPress plugins disappearing on sites during updates. This feature was enabled by default on certain tiers of Cloudflare including free accounts.

The best way to address this issue right now is to disable this setting in the Cloudflare dashboard.

This issue does not impact sites using NerdPress (or BigScoots) Cloudflare Enterprise as our settings override any settings in the free Cloudflare DNS account for this feature, and we have this feature turned off. Similarly, for sites on the Sucuri firewall and CDN, most features in the free Cloudflare account are negated.

In short, if you are a NerdPress client, you do not need to do this or worry about this. (This tutorial was created for some of our collaborators and partners.)

How to Disable Cloudflare Smart Brain

  1. Log into the Cloudflare account dashboard.
  2. Click on the domain on the Home page.
  3. Go to Speed > Optimizations in the sidebar.
The Speed > Optimization link in the Cloudflare dashboard sidebar.
The Speed > Optimization link in the Cloudflare dashboard sidebar.
  1. Click on the Content Optimization tab at the top of the page.
The Content Optimization tab inside the Speed > Optimization page in the Cloudflare Dashboard.
The Content Optimization tab inside the Speed > Optimization page in the Cloudflare Dashboard.
  1. Click the toggle to disable Speed Brain (turn it from green to gray or a right to left toggle position to disable).
Cloudflare Speed > Optimization > Content Optimization settings with the Speed Brain feature enabled.

This is how the setting will look when Speed Brain is disabled:

Cloudflare Speed > Optimization > Content Optimization settings with the Speed Brain feature disabled.
Cloudflare Speed > Optimization > Content Optimization settings with the Speed Brain feature disabled.

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