What was the problem?
I run with a local running club. People landing on our website didn’t know who we were, and what we offered wasn’t clear. So Dany, our head coach, got a lot of questions by email. The site also ran on WordPress, had malware in the past, and its hosting renewal was expensive.
What was the idea?
Answer people’s questions on the site itself: who we are, when we train, and how to try a session. And let staff publish news and race results themselves, on something safer and cheaper than WordPress.
What did I build?
I rebuilt the site from scratch instead of fixing the WordPress one. I built the main site with Astro, because most of the content is static. I set up EmDash as the blogging platform, because staff sometimes need to publish new articles or race results. To log in, staff enter their email and receive a code. Everything runs on Cloudflare, and every old article kept its address.
Club Citius. When someone visits: the browser loads the Astro site from a Cloudflare Worker at clubcitius.com, which reads the club content: pages and posts in D1, photos and PDFs in R2. Links go straight from the browser to AthleticsReg for sign-up and to the club’s Facebook and Strava. When staff publish: they sign in to the EmDash editor at admin.clubcitius.com with a code sent by Cloudflare Email, then publish to the same content. Cloudflare also runs the DNS and the domain.
What happened?
The new site went live, and it’s much faster: mobile performance went from 56 to 98. What we offer is now much clearer, Dany gets far fewer emails, and hosting became cheaper.
Before and after
Before
PageSpeed · Mobile
Costs
US $15 / month
Bluehost hosting, about US $539.64 over three years.
$18.68 USD for the last annual domain renewal at Namecheap.
After
PageSpeed · Mobile
Costs
Free-tier hosting
Hosting can fit within Cloudflare’s free tier. I pay US $5 a month for Cloudflare’s Workers Paid plan: it covers sending the login emails, and its extra capacity also serves my other projects.
$12.02 USD for the Cloudflare domain transfer including tax and an extra year of registration.