What Is Edge-First?
Traditional web hosting works like this: your site lives on a server in Virginia (or Frankfurt, or Singapore). When someone in Tokyo requests a page, the request crosses the Pacific, hits your server, builds the response, and travels back. Even with a fast server, physics adds latency.
Edge-first flips the model. Your site is deployed to every Cloudflare data center — over 300 locations worldwide. When that visitor in Tokyo makes a request, the response comes from a server a few milliseconds away.
Static Doesn’t Mean Simple
TechTailors sites are statically generated with Astro. Every page is pre-built at deploy time into plain HTML, CSS, and minimal JavaScript. No server-side rendering on each request. No database queries at runtime.
But static doesn’t mean limited. Dynamic features — contact forms, search, e-commerce — run as Cloudflare Workers at the edge. Same speed, full capability.
Astro’s island architecture ships zero JavaScript by default. Interactive components hydrate on demand — meaning your page is interactive before the JS even loads.
The Performance Stack
Here’s what powers the sub-100ms experience:
- Astro — Zero-JS by default. Only ships JavaScript when islands of interactivity need it.
- Cloudflare Pages — Global CDN deployment with automatic cache invalidation.
- Cloudinary — Images transformed and cached at delivery, not at request time.
- Typesense — Search index replicated to edge nodes for instant results.
Cloudinary and Cloudflare work hand in hand: Cloudinary handles the image transforms, Cloudflare caches the result at 300+ global PoPs. The first visitor triggers the transform; every visitor after gets a cache HIT.
Speed isn’t an optimization. It’s the architecture.