When using an external proxy or CDN in front of your Vercel deployment, you may encounter issues with stale content being served to users. This guide helps you diagnose and resolve these caching conflicts.
We do not recommend using external CDNs or proxies in front of Vercel deployments. Vercel's Edge Network is designed to deploy new releases without downtime by purging the Edge Network cache globally and replacing the current deployment. When you place another CDN in front of Vercel, it can cause issues because Vercel has no control over the other provider, leading to the serving of stale content or returning 404 errors.
Using reverse proxies like external CDNs will limit Vercel's traffic visibility for security measures, introduce latency that degrades performance, and create cache management issues that may affect reliability.
- Users see outdated content after deployments
- 404 errors for recently deployed pages
- Inconsistent content across different regions
- New features are not appearing despite successful deployments
If you must continue using an external CDN or proxy, follow these steps to resolve stale content issues:
The most effective solution is to entirely disable caching at your external CDN or proxy level. To avoid cache-related problems while still using another CDN, we recommend you either configure a short cache time or disable the cache entirely.
This ensures that all requests pass through to Vercel's Edge Network, which properly handles cache purging during deployments.
Ensure your external CDN is configured to point to the correct, current production deployment:
- Check that your CDN's origin is set to your production domain as configured on Vercel
- Verify DNS records are pointing to the correct Vercel deployment
- Confirm that any hardcoded URLs in your CDN configuration reference the latest deployment
To verify whether the correct content is returned from Vercel's Edge Network directly:
- Test with your
.vercel.appdomain: Access your site using the Vercel-generated URL (e.g.,your-project.vercel.app) to bypass the external CDN entirely - Compare content: Check if the content served directly from Vercel matches what you expect
- Isolate the issue: If the content is correct on the
.vercel.appdomain, but stale on your custom domain, the issue is with your external CDN configuration
If you continue experiencing stale content issues after following these steps, contact Vercel support with:
- Your deployment URLs (both custom domain and
.vercel.app) - CDN configuration details
- Specific examples of stale content
- Timeline of when issues began
Per our Support Terms, it may be necessary for the team to require you to disable or reconfigure your proxy before we can assist further.
While these troubleshooting steps can help resolve stale content issues, the most reliable solution is to remove external CDNs and proxies entirely and rely on Vercel's Edge Network for optimal performance, security, and cache management.