·AEO

Why We Moved webbROI Off Squarespace to Cloudflare

The speed, AEO, and API limits that made Squarespace the ceiling — and the lightweight Astro + Cloudflare Pages stack we replaced it with.

We’ve built on Squarespace for a decade. webbROI itself ran on Squarespace 7.0. This is the story of why we migrated this site off Squarespace onto Astro + Cloudflare Pages — and what it proved about where the platform hits its ceiling.

The three limits that triggered the move

1. Speed. Squarespace ships a 1.24MB core JavaScript bundle on every page. You can’t remove it, you can’t defer it cleanly, and Cloudflare’s Rocket Loader (which tries) breaks Squarespace’s own image loader — we watched Cumulative Layout Shift go from 0 to 0.568 the moment we enabled it. Mobile LCP was 14.5s. That’s not a tweak away from fast.

2. AEO. Answer-engine optimization is the new SEO — getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini. Squarespace’s default robots.txt is fine, but /llms.txt returns 404, you can’t inject custom AI-policy headers at the origin, and structured data is locked to the platform’s auto-generated schema.

3. No content API. Squarespace’s API is commerce-only. There is no blog/content endpoint. Our automated blog bot — “LLM drafts a post, publishes via API” — was impossible without fragile browser automation.

The stack we moved to

  • Astro — static-first, zero JavaScript by default, content collections for the blog. Ships HTML, not a JS hydration tax.
  • Markdown content — blog posts live in the repo as .md files. The blog bot commits markdown; Cloudflare Pages auto-deploys. Version history, no API vendor, fully portable.
  • Cloudflare Pages — edge hosting, sub-second TTFB globally, native cf-ray everything.

What we proved

Phase 1 of the sandbox proved Squarespace was the ceiling. Phase 2 is proving what’s on the other side. The same experiments that were hard on Squarespace — /llms.txt, custom headers, aggressive edge caching, an automated posting pipeline — are trivial on this stack.

We still build Squarespace sites for clients every day. But webbROI is now our Cloudflare + AEO lab, and the results speak for themselves.