I’ve been noticing some wonkiness with the admin area of our WordPress blog at CheatCodes.com EXTRA!. Through some experimentation, I noticed that all of the issues went away if I put CloudFlare into Development Mode. This, however, isn’t a long-term fix, so I decided to create a CloudFlare Page Rule for the /wp-admin/ directory. To do this, just login to CloudFlare and create a Page Rule that covers:

http://example.com/wp-admin/*

Then turn off EVERYTHING: apps, cache, security, always on, etc.

This fixed most of my problem, but I noticed that I still had issues when logging in or out of the WordPress admin area, and I couldn’t figure out why.

Then it hit me – the login page for the WordPress admin area isn’t in the WordPress admin area, and therefore wasn’t covered by my CloudFlare Page Rule! Instead, the WordPress login page is here:

http://example.com/wp-login.php

So I added a second page rule that covered:

http://example.com/wp-login.php*

The asterisk is necessary to cover URLs such as:

http://example.com/wp-login.php?loggedout=true

Now the login/logout hangs and other strange behavior are gone, my WordPress admin area works great for all our authors, and I’m still benefitting from CloudFlare protection and optimization across the rest of the blog.

So if you’re noticing strangeness between WordPress and CloudFlare, create a Page Rule!