How Full-Page HTML Edge Caching via Cloudflare Dramatically Cuts Laravel TTFB

A practical guide published on DEV Community explains how full-page HTML edge caching through Cloudflare can eliminate origin requests entirely for Laravel applications, delivering finished HTML from nearby data centers in milliseconds. The core challenge is that Laravel attaches a Set-Cookie header to nearly every response, which prevents shared caches from storing it — leaving most teams with uncached HTML and high time-to-first-byte for distant visitors. The proposed solution centers on a custom Laravel middleware called EdgeCache that acts as the sole authority on cacheability, emitting Cache-Control: public, s-maxage=600 for anonymous GET requests returning a 200 HTML response, and no-cache for everything else. The middleware strips Set-Cookie headers from cacheable responses and excludes authenticated users, error pages, and flash-session responses by default, ensuring safe sharing between visitors. Because caching rules live in the application codebase rather than a Cloudflare dashboard, they go through code review, can be tested, and behave consistently across staging and production environments.