How to purge CDN content while protecting origin capacity

URL, file, directory

Cloud CDN can purge by URL, file or directory. Use the narrowest scope. A product image is a URL. A theme release may be a directory. A whole-distribution wipe is a last resort.

The delivery model

Hook it to publish and deploy

CI should purge HTML and any unhashed paths after a production deploy. CMS webhooks should purge the node, product or landing-page URL that changed — not the entire site on every draft save.

Prefetch is the opposite operation

Before a launch, prefetch heroes, depots or HTML so the first users do not all miss together. Shield still helps; warm cache helps more.

Confirm with logs

After purge, the next request should miss once, then hit. If origin traffic does not move, you purged the wrong key (query string, trailing slash, encoded path).

Validate before production

Change a visible version marker in a test resource and purge that URL. Confirm both the body and relevant variants, then observe the resulting origin requests. Browser caches may still hold fresh copies, so use versioned assets when possible.

• Record the configuration and expected result before changing traffic.
• Keep evidence of the test and a working rollback for the previous behavior.