The worst problems are the ones that don’t leave you a clue for why they are happening. Such an one will cause much grief. No messages, warning, or errors. I like using plugins for WordPress, plain and simple, and as long as they aren’t hurting my page speed the more the merrier (If you need it). Plugins save the time of trying to figure out ways to do things that someone else has already figured out, and nine times out of nine, they do it better than I can anyhow. Some are just huge time savers.
One of my favorite time savers is a plugin by Jordy Meow called Media File Renamer Pro that does just what it says. It adds alt tags also. I run this on a lot of web sites and I was having an issue on some sites where I could change the plugin settings, and on others I couldn’t change any settings. There were no errors to tell me what was wrong. I disabled plugins, no change. I created a subdomain and installed a clean site with only the Media File Renamer plugin and the problem persisted. Super confusing!
Cache Deception Armor Content-Type Mismatch
All sites were on the same version of WordPress and Media File Renamer, so that only left one other variable that was different between sites and that difference was Cloudflare. I love Cloudflare, but they have features that can really cause trouble and it’s usually Rocket Loader™, but not this time. This time I had added a feature called “Cache Armor Deception” to my last page rule and that was breaking the WordPress REST API. I like tight security so Cache Deception Armor sounded like a good thing. Maybe for some sites and plugins, but not for some WordPress plugins if they aren’t written to handle content types properly. If your using Cache Deception Armor and anything in your site has a Content-Type mismatch, the asset will not be cached and can therefore behave very strangely, like some needed assets are missing in your requests. I hope I said that right so that it makes sense.
Anyhow, if you use Cloudflare with Cache Deception Armor and things seem broken, get rid of it ( Cache Deception Armor I mean ).
Resources
Definitive Guide to WordPress on Cloudflare Free
Understanding Cloudflare’s CDN
Cache Deception Armor Resources
Understanding Our Cache and the Web Cache Deception Attack
Web Cache Deception Attack revisited
Always Online (Also Breaks REST API)
Understanding Cloudflare Always Online
Rocket Loader™ Resources ( just in case )
Ditch Rocket Loader™ too.
(see also “What does Rocket Loader do?”)
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Professional geek and early implementer of virtualization in 1998.
Small business owner and was once the network admin for Knight Transportation. Racquetball fanatic, but had to retire from it.
Business, Technical, and Administrative Professional of Web Design, SEO, SSO, UX/UI, Networked Systems, and Virtualization with more than 20 years of experience.