Case study · June 2026

23 sites. One perf push. Under 500 ms desktop LCP p75.

A personal fleet on Cloudflare Workers and Pages had a split personality: *.workers.dev URLs were fast; custom domains sat on a 400–1000 ms TTFB floor. This is what actually moved the needle — measured with psi-swarm, not a single Lighthouse run.

Baseline

• 23 shipped fleet sites, mix of Next-on-Workers and Astro-on-Pages
• Goal: desktop LCP p75 < 500 ms across the inventory
• Constraint: no Argo Smart Routing, no Vercel migration

What worked

• Astro static overlays for marketing / routes — same app behind, fast HTML at the edge
• Self-hosted fonts instead of render-blocking Google Fonts CSS
• Opacity-0 hero animations removed — they were 40–70% of LCP render delay
• CF Cache Rules + caches.default for semi-dynamic Worker homepages
• Distributional audits — p75 across repeated runs, not one PSI score

Results

Five sites closed under 500 ms in the first push. Remaining gap is app-level TTFB on custom domains — a known Cloudflare Workers floor without paid routing.

Longer write-up

Narrative devlog with lessons and links: How I run 23 products on Cloudflare without Argo

Try it

psi-swarm runs locally, tracks history in SQLite, and now surfaces Ahrefs Domain Rating for custom domains in the projects dashboard.