I built a blogging platform on Cloudflare Workers. Here's how it went.

#blogging #wordpress #ghost #jekyll

I wanted to start a personal blog.

WordPress felt like overkill. Ghost Cloud also felt too much, and I need a server for self-hosting. Medium doesn't let you own your content. Substack is for newsletters, not blogs.

In the past, I had used static site generators. Particularly, I had a Jekyll blog. I just didn't want to go through the hassle of managing files every time I wanted to write a new post.

So I built my own.

The stack

JustBlogged runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers. No traditional servers.

Here's why:

Edge deployment = content served from 300+ locations worldwide
Cold starts under 5ms
No scaling headaches
Cost is almost nothing at low traffic

For storage, I'm using Cloudflare KV for metadata and caching and R2 for assets.

Supporting custom domains and SSL was done by setting up one reverse proxy server, as Cloudflare for SaaS custom domains felt limited (you have to be an enterprise to use Apex domains).

What actually took time

The blogging part was easy. The hard parts:

Custom domains — DNS propagation, SSL certificate provisioning, handling edge cases where someone's domain has weird CNAME setups
Image optimization — Auto-resizing, WebP conversion, lazy loading. Users upload 5MB images and expect fast pages
Theme system — Making themes customizable without giving users enough rope to hang themselves
Ensuring a built-in caching (and purge) mechanism so each page load is always less than 500ms.
Rich-text editor can take time if you don't like the default setups

Numbers

Average page load: under 500ms mostly for cold hits and around 300ms for hot hits
Setup time for new blog: ~2 minutes - just sign up, and start writing
Infra cost per blog: basically zero until you hit serious traffic