Cloudflare products vanityURLs leaves out
Cloudflare has more useful products than a short-link redirector should use.
That is not a criticism of Cloudflare. It is an operating boundary. vanityURLs uses Cloudflare DNS, Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Access, SSL/TLS, and selected edge protections. The baseline product list lives in Cloudflare products. The detailed setup lives in Network protection.
This page records the other side of that decision: products that are visible, useful in the right deployment, and still not part of the default vanityURLs setup.
The Exclusion Test
A Cloudflare product belongs in the baseline only if it protects or serves one of four surfaces:
- DNS and TLS for the short domain
- the Worker runtime
- protected operational pages such as
/en/_stats/, other localized stats paths, and/_tests - edge controls that reject traffic before the Worker runs
Everything else needs a specific local reason.
Non-Baseline Products
| Product | Why it stays out of the baseline |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare Web Analytics and Real User Monitoring | They add browser-side telemetry. vanityURLs uses server-side events from the Worker when analytics are enabled. |
| Bulk Redirects | They create a second redirect system beside the Git-managed link registry and Worker resolver. |
| Cache Rules and Cache Response Rules | They can preserve stale redirect decisions, lifecycle states, or analytics gaps. Static assets already carry their own headers. |
| Cloudflare Turnstile | It protects forms and interactive flows. The stock redirector has no public submission form, visitor login, checkout, or comment box. |
| Workers Analytics | It is an observability surface, not a setup step. Use it after deployment for Worker health, not application event counts. |
As of the 2026-05-29 dashboard capture, these exclusions are also tracked in data/cloudflare-protection-defaults.json. Last verified: 2026-05-29
The Tradeoff
Leaving a product out can feel wasteful. The dashboard is right there.
But every extra product can add a second source of truth, a paid-plan dependency, browser-side code, or another place to debug a redirect that should have been boring.
Use the excluded products when the deployment actually needs them. Write down the reason when you do. Otherwise, leave the redirector small.