What Are Cloudflare Workers?

Cloudflare Workers is a global serverless compute platform that allows websites and code alike to run at low latency. Cloudflare provides services to over a fifth of all websites around the world. There are many benefits to the Cloudflare Workers platform that we will cover in this post.

Cloudflare Workers vs. Traditional Hosting

Standard website or web application hosting requires a network request to travel all the way to a specific data center or server. However, there are several drawbacks to this approach as seen below when compared to Cloudflare Workers.

Traditional Hosting:

1. Cost: Higher operating cost due to running servers 24/7/365.
2. Speed: Increased wait times and latency for users due to being restricted to one location.
3. Security: More vulnerable to cybersecurity threats like DDoS attacks and software bugs.
4. Uptime: Increased chance of application downtime due to maintenance, hardware failure, or major increases in user traffic.
5. Spam: Your SEO or site traffic can be negatively impacted by others if you share an IP address with bad actors at a datacenter.

Cloudflare Workers:

1. Cost: For basic websites the cost of hosting drops to essentially $0 per month for most people. For more complex web apps, the cost can vary but typically it will be much lower than traditional hosting methods.
2. Speed: In most cases, response times for Workers is under 50ms for 95% of users worldwide (Stated on Cloudflare homepage as of this posting). This is hugely beneficial for websites and SEO rankings.
3. Security: Protected by industry-leading Cloudflare security including DDoS protection, Zero Trust Access, Web Application Firewalls (WAF), and much more.
4. Uptime: Virtually 100% uptime due to the distributed nature of the network.
5. Spam: You control your content and how data is sent and processed. This prevents bad actors from affecting your site negatively.

Benefits for Website Performance

There are numerous benefits to Workers but the most important is their speed. Response times of sub 50ms can consistently make your site load in under 1 second with a well designed site for most users. If you are running on slow website builders like Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy, you are losing customers to competitors with modern sites. This more or less means your site will load as close as possible to your visitors instead of from a shared datacenter tied to one location.

Users expect pages to load in under 3 seconds. Studies show that 53% of mobile users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load, and each additional second of load time increases bounce rates by up to 32%.

The way to solve this is by using a web framework such as Astro that serves as little code to your users as possible. WordPress sites are notoriously slow, look outdated, prone to hacks, and generally lack uniqueness. Cloudflare Workers and Astro make a strong setup for a fast, low-maintenance site.

And better yet the cost is near $0 for this combination. You only pay at-cost for your domain per year and Cloudflare Workers generous free tier covers the rest for most basic sites.

Why This Matters in Today’s Internet

Cloud compute has been on the rise for quite some time now, however small businesses usually lag behind on older tech. Not only do slow and unmaintained websites hurt organic traffic, they lowers traffic from tools like AI and other aggregation services. Overall internet traffic is increasingly being driven by AI (as seen in the graphic below) and whether you like it or not, it’s critical to your website staying relevant. This is another factor to consider on top of site performance for organic user traffic.

Most small business websites don’t have blogs, FAQs, or other descriptors for these AI tools to pick up on. Having poor content is just as bad as slow performance for your site traffic. As this technology advances it becomes ever more important to target the AI algorithms within different social media sites like Reddit, Facebook, and X/Twitter to name a few. Adding this content-driven approach to your online presence strategy should be a high priority.

Final Thoughts

Upgrading your site to the latest tech and modern infrastructure is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase referrals and traffic over time. Not only will it likely cost less, it will be better prepared for the future. Worthy Restos specializes in using Cloudflare Workers and the Astro web framework to provide you with the most modern site for your business. If you are interested in learning more about this topic or getting started with a new web presence, follow the link in the card below.