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.