How Cloudflare’s Speed Brain Gave Us a WordPress Headache

Cloudflare recently rolled out a clever new feature called Speed Brain, designed to make websites load faster by prefetching navigation links. On the surface, it sounds fantastic—who doesn’t want faster loading times? But, as we discovered firsthand at NW Design, this nifty tool had some unexpected side effects: WordPress plugin updates started failing. Worse yet, Cloudflare had enabled this feature by default for all free accounts, though it was still in beta. This inconsistency meant the problem appeared on some sites and not others, making it even harder to pin down.

Our Struggle with WordPress Updates: At NW Design, we found ourselves scratching our heads when routine tasks like deleting posts and updating WordPress plugins stopped working. It didn’t make sense. Naturally, we suspected server permissions were to blame, so we dove deep into every possible angle, troubleshooting settings, and permissions at the server level. But nothing seemed to solve the issue. We were on the brink of frustration, unsure where to turn next.

What Was Happening? As it turns out, Cloudflare’s Speed Brain feature was the hidden troublemaker. When this feature is activated, it begins prefetching navigation links to boost site speed. However, this process was clashing with how WordPress handles plugin updates, causing them to fail. We encountered errors such as:

• “Installation failed: could not copy file.”
• “WordPress update failed: the package could not be installed. Missing file.”
• “Update failed: could not move the old version to the upgrade-temp-backup directory.”
• Or even just a cryptic “Update failed: -1.”

In some cases, plugins would outright disappear, or their updates wouldn’t complete properly. And if you didn’t have a staging site to test on, this could lead to major headaches trying to fix live sites. Even rolling back a staging site after discovering the problem was far from ideal.

Why Was It Happening? The root issue lies in the way Speed Brain’s prefetching overlaps with WordPress’ update process. Prefetching is meant to improve site performance by anticipating the next page you’ll click on, but it inadvertently interrupts the plugin update sequence in WordPress. This interruption leads to incomplete installations or outright failures, which was exactly what we were experiencing.

The Solution: After extensive troubleshooting (and nearly pulling our hair out), we finally discovered the issue wasn’t with WordPress itself, nor with server permissions. It was Cloudflare’s Speed Brain feature all along! The solution was right under our noses the entire time. By simply turning off Speed Brain in the Cloudflare dashboard, we resolved the problem in no time.

To disable Speed Brain, we had to navigate to the Cloudflare dashboard and go to “Speed > Optimization > Content Optimization” to find the option to switch it off. This completely resolved the issues we were having with plugin updates and deleting posts.

What Can You Do? If you’re running into similar issues, the best course of action is to turn off Speed Brain on all domains associated with your Cloudflare account. Until Cloudflare rolls out a permanent fix, it’s better to keep this feature disabled if you want your WordPress plugins to update smoothly and avoid similar headaches.

At NW Design, we learned that sometimes the solution is right in front of you—even if it’s a feature designed to help, like Speed Brain. In the end, we got everything running smoothly again, but it’s a reminder that even the most helpful tools can sometimes cause more problems than they solve!