Deploying Modern Web Apps: Performance, Reliability, and Edge Best Practices

Edge-first deployment reduces latency and simplifies scaling. This guide covers practices I use to keep sites fast and resilient.

Build optimization

• Split build into incremental artifacts and cache dependencies in CI.
• Use image optimization (AVIF/WebP) and critical CSS.

Edge & CDN

• Serve static content from the edge (Cloudflare/Netlify/Vercel) and keep origin compute minimal.
• Cache smartly — short origin TTLs with long CDN caching for assets that change rarely.

Example Cloudflare Pages headers

Add _headers or Cloudflare rules to set caching and security headers:

/*
	Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, s-maxage=3600
	Referrer-Policy: same-origin
	X-Frame-Options: DENY

This balances freshness and edge performance.

Safe rollouts

• Use feature flags for risky changes and quick rollbacks.
• Have automatic health checks and synthetic monitoring to detect regressions.

CI/CD checklist

• Build on pull request, run unit and integration tests, and run a smoke test on a preview URL before merge.

Quick rollout pattern

• Build on PR to a preview URL, run a smoke test, and gate merge on green checks.
• After merge, create a canary deployment (5% traffic) and promote automatically if health checks pass for 30 minutes.

Want a one-click Cloudflare Pages setup (with caching headers and headers config)? I can add an example pages config and netlify.toml equivalent.

Interested in a deployment review or configuration? Contact me or view my launches at the showcase.