Cloudflare Page Rules vs Cache Rules

What Page Rules were for

Cloudflare's original kitchen-sink rule product is Page Rules. Each rule matched a URL pattern (a single path or a wildcard glob) and then toggled a range of settings in one go: cache level, edge TTL, browser cache expiry, always-use-HTTPS, forwarding URL, security level, and more. It was the one tool every site used to tune the edge, and it worked long enough that a generation of tutorials and dashboards still reference it today.

The cost of that convenience is that one product mixed unrelated concerns. A rule like "Cache Everything + Edge Cache TTL + Forwarding URL" put caching, TLS, and redirection in the same box, and the box had a strict rule count per plan (three on the free plan). When you ran out of slots, you had to decide which behavior to drop, because the product offered one lozenge per path and that was the unit of everything.

What happened to Page Rules

Cloudflare announced in earnest that Page Rules would be replaced by a suite of dedicated rule products built on a shared evaluation engine, and it has been shipping those since: Cache Rules, Configuration Rules, Redirect Rules, Origin Rules, and Transform Rules. Cache Rules became generally available in late 2023, and Cloudflare has published an official page-rules migration guide mapping every legacy switch to its new home.

The product is now being deprecated at the end of its life. The dashboard keeps the legacy switch for now, but new zones and new accounts no longer reach for it, and Cloudflare's own documentation routes operators to the replacement suite. If you still have Page Rules, expect Cloudflare to migrate them for you on its schedule; otherwise you can migrate manually using the documented mapping.

The mapping table

The products are evaluated in a fixed order (Origin Rules run first, then Cache Rules, then Configuration Rules, then Redirect Rules), so architecture decisions can sit in the right place instead of fighting each other. That ordering is also why two rules that used to be crammed into one Page Rule must now be two separate rules with the correct evaluation order.

May I still use Page Rules?

Yes, if your zone still has the panel and Cloudflare has not migrated you yet. But treat it as legacy, meaning: do not build new rules on it, and prefer the current product for any new setting. The migration guide covers the exact pairing table; the short version is: cache behavior to Cache Rules, any redirect to Redirect Rules, any setting like "Always Use HTTPS" to Configuration Rules, and any origin change to Origin Rules.

The 101 on the replacement products

• Cache Rules set how long content is cached at the edge and what counts as the cache key (also the home of "Cache Everything" and status-code TTLs) alongside origin Cache-Control handling. See Cloudflare cache TTL tuning.
• Configuration Rules toggle zone settings for matching requests (HTTPS, Security Level, email obfuscation, browser check, "always use HTTPS").
• Redirect Rules do URL forwarding, static or dynamic, including wildcards.
• Origin Rules override the origin connection (host header, port, TLS).
• Transform Rules rewrite request or response URLs and headers.

That set covers everything Page Rules used to do, with more slots and clearer per-product semantics. If a legacy zone does not need a full migration, the browser-cache / cookie-bypass pattern has a direct Cache Rules equivalent, see the cache rules for dynamic content page.

Prevention

• Do not pile new behaviors into one rule; one job per rule, and the entire suite follows.
• When you enable a new rule, confirm the evaluation order (Origin before Cache before Config before Redirect).
• Re-check the plan quota for each product, because they each have their own count differently from the old shared Page Rules pool.
• Keep your Page Rules panel off as the default, and migrate only when Cloudflare or the current docs signal a deadline.