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CoreSpeed Workers, Routes, and Origin Routing

Ryan Sullivan

CoreSpeed uses Cloudflare Workers as middleware in front of the WordPress origin.

For this architecture, a Worker Route is more appropriate than a Worker Custom Domain because WordPress remains the external application origin. Cloudflare recommends Routes when a Worker must execute before requests continue to an external application server.

Route requirements

Cloudflare requires:

  • An active Cloudflare zone
  • A deployed Worker
  • A matching DNS record
  • Proxying enabled for the hostname
  • A route pattern mapped to the Worker

A typical route pattern is:

example.com/*

The wildcard applies the Worker to requests across the domain.

Cloudflare routes require the hostname to have a proxied DNS record. A DNS-only hostname will not invoke the Worker.

CoreSpeed Worker roles

CoreSpeed uses different Worker behavior during the website lifecycle:

  • Preview routing before launch
  • Page caching after launch
  • Cache revalidation after content changes
  • Query-string and cookie handling
  • Origin routing
  • Response normalization

The preview route is replaced by the production page-cache route after launch.

Origin override behavior

CoreSpeed can direct a request to a specific origin while preserving the public website hostname.

Cloudflare’s resolveOverride property changes the hostname used for DNS resolution without changing the request’s public URL or Host header.

For security reasons, both the public hostname and the override hostname must exist inside the same Cloudflare zone. If the actual origin is outside the zone, an in-zone CNAME must first point to that external destination.

CoreSpeed therefore uses a dedicated in-zone origin-resolution hostname when this routing method is required.

Change-control guidance

IT teams should not independently:

  • Delete CoreSpeed Worker routes
  • Change route patterns
  • Attach another Worker to the same website paths
  • Delete origin-resolution records
  • Change the CoreSpeed origin target
  • Disable proxying on the primary website records

Any of these actions can bypass the CoreSpeed caching or routing layer.

Related Cloudflare documentation

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