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How I run 23 products on Cloudflare without Argo

#performance#cloudflare#astro#web-vitals

I ship a lot of small products — 23 live sites on Cloudflare Workers and Pages, mostly solo. The fleet had a split personality: *.workers.dev and *.pages.dev URLs were fast, but custom domains sat on a 400–1000 ms TTFB floor. PageSpeed Insights gave me one number per URL. That number lied often enough that I built psi-swarm to run Lighthouse many times and report p50/p75/p90/p99 instead.

This post is the narrative version. The structured case study with baseline, tactics, and results lives on Foundry.

The constraint

No Argo Smart Routing. No Vercel migration. Goal: desktop LCP p75 under 500 ms across the inventory.

That sounds like a CDN problem until you look at the breakdown. On several Worker homepages, TTFB on a custom domain was 2–3× the same route on *.workers.dev. Cloudflare’s free tier routing is real; fighting it with more JavaScript is not.

What actually moved LCP

1. Astro static overlays for marketing / routes

Several apps are Next.js or React on Workers. The app shell is fine for logged-in flows; the landing page does not need SSR on every request. I added thin Astro sites that serve static HTML at / and link into the app. Same product behind the URL, but the LCP element is plain HTML at the edge — not a hydration waterfall.

2. Self-hosted fonts

Google Fonts CSS is render-blocking and adds DNS + connection setup. Moving to @fontsource (self-hosted, subsetted) removed a recurring 200–400 ms delay on mobile-slow presets.

3. Killed opacity-0 hero animations

This one hurt to admit. Framer Motion fade-ins on above-the-fold heroes were 40–70% of LCP render delay on multiple sites. The hero image loaded; the browser waited to paint it because opacity was zero until JS ran. Removing or deferring those animations was often a bigger win than image compression.

4. Edge cache for semi-dynamic Worker homepages

For routes that cannot go fully static, Cache-Control headers plus caches.default in a thin worker wrapper let repeat visitors hit cached HTML. Not a substitute for static where static fits — but it trimmed TTFB on homepages that still need a Worker.

5. Distributional measurement

Single Lighthouse runs are noisy. psi-swarm runs the same URL across realistic device/network presets, stores history in SQLite, and surfaces regressions in a /projects dashboard. I stopped optimizing for one green PSI score and started watching p75 LCP week over week.

Results

Five sites closed under 500 ms desktop LCP p75 in the first push. The remaining gap is app-level TTFB on custom domains — a known Workers floor without paid routing. The wins were front-end and architecture choices I could ship in a week, not magic CDN settings.

Try the tooling

If you are running a personal product fleet on Cloudflare, the highest-leverage move is usually: static HTML at /, measure p75 not p50, and delete the hero fade-in. Everything else is incremental.