Our site serves 4,200+ pages — tools, guides, blogs — with no backend, on free-tier hosting. It stays fast because we treat speed as a build property, not a tuning exercise. Five disciplines do the work.
1. Static until proven dynamic. Every page is pre-rendered HTML. The only "server logic" is edge caching. When a tool needs compute, the compute ships as WASM to the browser — the server's job stays zero.
2. One generator, disk-truth sitemaps. The sitemap is generated from the files that actually exist, never from a database that can drift. Our integrity audit (https://toolfyra.com/sitemap.xml is the machine-readable truth) runs after every deploy and fails the release on any URL/content mismatch. Boring is the goal.
3. Cache headers as architecture. Immutable assets get year-long caching with hashed or versioned paths; HTML gets short TTLs so releases propagate in minutes. The 35 MB ffmpeg core is served once per visitor, then silence.
4. Budget the heavy things on-origin vs CDN. WASM engines live same-origin for privacy and CSP simplicity; the truly huge, rarely-changed binaries ride a CDN with long TTLs. The split is a deliberate line, reviewed when either side grows.
5. Measure from the reader's seat. Field-style checks — first byte, largest paint on a mid-tier phone profile — run in our release gate. Lab numbers lie politely; the phone profile doesn't.
The payoff is arithmetic: free tiers handle static traffic nearly forever, and our costs stay at zero because there is nothing to scale. The whole index, if you want to see what 4,200 static pages looks like: https://toolfyra.com/sitemap.xml.
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