Cloudflare Details Its Migration from WordPress to EmDash
Cloudflare recently documented the migration of its main blog from WordPress to EmDash, the open source content management system developed internally. The new platform is designed to improve performance and caching, and it was tested to handle traffic of up to 7000 requests per second. By Renato Losio
Cloudflare has recently shared the details of its migration from WordPress to EmDash, an open-source content management system (CMS) developed internally. EmDash is designed to enhance performance and caching capabilities, and Cloudflare tested its ability to handle up to 7,000 requests per second. The company announced the v0.1.0 developer preview of EmDash in April, positioning it as a successor to WordPress.
Cloudflare's production setup currently runs EmDash on a Worker, incorporating multiple caching layers, including Workers Cache and an EmDash object cache built on Workers KV. Additionally, it utilizes Cloudflare Hyperdrive to connect EmDash to a PlanetScale database. The company positions itself as the platform's first customer, migrating its own blog to EmDash after identifying limitations in its existing platform.
The migration resulted in a faster and more reliable site. Senior manager of content engineering Kody Jackson, systems engineer Diogo Carneiro, and senior design engineer Amy Dutton noted that while the blog typically handles about 75 requests per second, it can spike above 5,000 requests per second, making page load performance crucial.
Comparing response latencies between the old architecture and EmDash revealed a significant difference: the new system maintains a flat, consistent response profile, even under load, whereas the previous platform experienced periodic latency spikes.
To facilitate a smooth transition, Cloudflare employed a proxy Worker to gradually route traffic from the WordPress blog to the EmDash-powered site, with an automatic fallback to the legacy site in case of errors. The rollout began at 1% of traffic and progressively increased until reaching 100% within a single day. The proxy Worker utilized a version cookie on requests to route incoming traffic to either the new or legacy experience, allowing for a seamless transition.
Reddit discussions highlighted the proxy Worker, cookie-based routing, and fallback mechanism as key factors in the successful migration. One commenter emphasized the importance of these elements in a zero-downtime rollout plan, including a kill switch, per-request fallback, and metrics split by cohort to identify cache regressions before they affect a larger user base.
The migration also improved accessibility for AI agents. Cloudflare introduced a new MCP server for the Cloudflare Blog and another for EmDash, enabling authors to browse, create, edit, publish, and schedule content. Some early adoption issues were reported by editors, primarily related to the editing experience and scheduled posts. Cloudflare stated that the EmDash team is actively working on a v1 release, though no official date has been announced.
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