Two years ago, this site moved from GitHub Pages to Netlify.

Overall, Netlify is a wonderful solution and I expect I’ll continue to use it for other projects.

This blog is a very simple sandbox: it’s pure Jekyll and doesn’t use any serverless functions, making it trivial to move from one provider to another. I didn’t need to change, but I was curious – knowing that it would require almost zero configuration or fixing.

Plus, Cloudflare and Netlify both have the relevant features for this site:

  • CSS/JS minification out of the box, though this website is purposely very light.
  • Custom header, even with the same _headers file and syntax.
  • Automagic HTTPS.

Even though Cloudflare has improved build times already, they are still very much behind Netlify in my experience: my last commit took 18s to build and deploy on Netlify vs 3m 16s on Cloudflare! A shocking ten times slower!

Cloudflare Pages also lacks build/deploy notifications, which is a big downer.

If you are using the JAMstack to its fullest potential, Netlify is the better option, without a doubt. It’s not worth migrating unless you want to leverage other Cloudflare products like R2 and KV Store.

In my case, I’ll continue to use this blog as a guinea pig to see how the product grows.