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 pieces load on demand, and plain links and forms work before any JavaScript arrives.
The Performance Stack
Here’s what keeps it fast:
- Astro: Zero-JS by default. Only ships JavaScript when islands of interactivity need it.
- Cloudflare Workers: every page served from a Cloudflare data center near your visitor, fresh on every deploy.
- Cloudinary: Images transformed and cached at delivery, not at request time.
- Typesense: on sites with search, a dedicated cluster for each client.
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.