Taking Your Website Off Cloudflare Without Messing Things Up


cloudflare woman looking upset in front of silver laptop

This article will help you avoid common mistakes when trying to get your website off Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is not a bad company at all. They offer great services and some of them are free. But it may be that your just realised your website did not even need Cloudflare in the first place, or you have a cheaper or even free alternatively to what made you start using Cloudflare and so you want to take your website off it.

If you are using blogger, you may want to change name servers and make use of blogger’s new custom domain SSL certificate.

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If you know a little bit about these things and probably moved to Cloudflare yourself, you may think moving is a peace of cake – it is, actually. But simple mistakes can mean hours or one full day of “this site can’t be reached.”

Pretty sure you know the effect of that on a website that get visits everyday: it annoys your users, gives a bad impression to visitors and stays inaccessible to search engine crawlers.

Here is how to delete or take your website off Cloudflare – returning your name servers to original registrar – hassle free and in a way that allows your website to stay accessible throughout the switch.

Before we begin: do not pause, delete your website or the DNS from Cloudflare. Doing this will cause your website to go offline even when nameservers and DNS have been properly set at original registrar’s panel.

Pausing, deleting or disabling your website on Cloudflare is the last step in the process.

How to move your website back to original Registrar

Start by setting up name servers and DNS at original registrar, they could be Namecheap, Godaddy or some other company. Replace cloudflare’s nameservers with the default nameservers at registrar’s DNS panel. 

Once you are done, check your site at intodns.com – enter your URL without www.

If your site now points to your Host, then it’s time to grey-cloud DNS on Cloudflare.  (If you are on blogger.com, it should point to ghs.google.com)

This is where you should enable https for your website, if you have been on https. If you are using blogger.com, see how to enable blogger custom domain httpsOpens in a new tab. then come back and complete the steps.

Once you are done, go to Cloudflare DNS tab and grey-cloud every single DNS setting.

Check with your registrar to see if they have control over your DNS. This helps you confirm if the nameserver changes have gone global. 

Nameserver changes may take a day or two to set. So if you disable or take your site off Cloudflare before this happens, your website will immediately go offline.

But to be on the safe side, even when your domain name registrar confirms control over DNS, try to wait for 24 hours before completely taking your site off Cloudflare.

And that’s takes us to the final step which is deleting your website from Cloudflare.

Follow these steps to delete your website from Cloudflare:

  1. Login to cloudflare
  2. Select website you want to delete
  3. Make sure you are on the Overview tab
  4. Click on Advanced link
  5. Click on delete
  6. Confirm delete

Pausing a Website on Cloudflare

If you want to pause your website on cloudflare, follow the steps above but after clicking on the advanced link, go for pause website.

When deleting or pausing your website on Cloudflare using a smartphone, the process is similar.

To delete website on Cloudflare using a smartphone, follow the steps outlined.

  1. Login to Cloudflare
  2. Select the website
  3. Select Overview tab
  4. Click on Advanced link
  5. Select delete
  6. Confirm delete

That all you need to safely take your website off Cloudflare, back to preferred domain name registrar.

If you are facing some issues, drop a comment below and we will help you out.

Ekemini Robert

Hello, my name is Ekemini Robert, creator of Electronics Diary. I started writing about satellite TV about 5 years ago. My work is to create resources that will help us learn more about Digital Media and how they can best serve us.

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