Pageflare + Vercel in 3 Steps

Getting your WordPress site onto Vercel’s edge network is a three-command process. Here’s the complete walkthrough.

Step 1: Export with Simply Static

Install and activate the Simply Static plugin. Configure it to output files to a local directory — ./static-export works well. Then generate your export.

wp plugin install simply-static --activate
# Then click Generate in the WordPress admin, or:
wp simply-static generate

You’ll end up with a directory containing all your pages, posts, assets, and media as flat files. This is your raw static site — functional but not yet optimized.

Step 2: Run Pageflare

Point pageflare at your export directory. The --in-place flag tells it to overwrite files in the same directory rather than writing to a new output.

npx @pageflare/cli ./static-export --in-place

Pageflare will run 12+ optimization passes: HTML minification, JS deferral, CSS optimization, image lazy loading, Google Fonts self-hosting, YouTube facade injection, WordPress bloat removal, and more. The output is logged to your terminal.

Step 3: Deploy to Vercel

Navigate into your export directory and run the Vercel CLI. Vercel detects that it’s a static site and deploys it to their global edge network automatically.

cd ./static-export && vercel

Vercel gives you a production URL and optional custom domain support. Your site is now served from edge nodes worldwide — static files, edge-cached, with no origin server to maintain.

The Result

A WordPress site that previously scored 60–70 on PageSpeed typically reaches 95+ after this pipeline. Not because WordPress got faster, but because it’s no longer in the critical path. You get WordPress’s authoring experience with a static site’s delivery performance.

Pageflare