Lighthouse called the shots: moving Bold Leap host after host
Bold Leap earns from ads, so every host move was judged on Lighthouse load speed. Here is the order it moved in, and what an ad-funded site can copy.
TL;DR
- Every Bold Leap host move came down to one number: Lighthouse load speed.
- It now runs on Cloudflare as an Astro build. In mobile lab tests it scored 50 to 62, and the server answered almost instantly, so the server isn't what held the score back.
Use this if: your site earns from ads and feels slow.
Bold Leap has moved house more often than most websites, and every move was decided on load speed alone.
It’s Lexi’s site, and I’ve built and hosted it through more host moves than I’d like to admit. Plain old cPanel, then other small cPanel hosts, Hostinger, InMotion, DigitalOcean (through a cloud host whose name I’ve honestly forgotten), AWS, back to Hostinger, and now Cloudflare. Those moves were mostly about ad money, and Lighthouse load speed was the number calling the shots.
Speed was the whole brief
Bold Leap publishes design guides, fonts and tools, and earns from display ads. The bet behind the moves was simple: faster pages would mean better ad earnings. Each host was judged on Lighthouse, Google’s free tool that tests a page and scores how quickly it loads.
Most of the readers are in the US, so at one point Lexi and I moved the site to a US-based host to cut the distance every request had to travel.
What changed besides the host
In the round of work that put Bold Leap on cloud hosting for its US readers, I also:
- moved its DNS and security settings to Cloudflare
- optimised the pages for faster load times and the Core Web Vitals (Google’s measures of how quickly a page loads, responds to taps and settles into place)
- rewrote the key pages so they were clearer
- set up and verified AdSense and Google Analytics
The articles page on the old WordPress build, before the move to Astro.
The same build on mobile.
What to copy if your site earns from ads
- Check where your readers are before you pay for a bigger server. Your analytics will tell you. If most of them are on another continent, a closer host can do more than a bigger one.
- Once your server is close to your readers, put a CDN in front of it. A CDN keeps copies of your files on servers around the world, so readers get them from somewhere nearby. Cloudflare has a free plan.
- Lower your DNS TTL well before you move. The TTL is how long other servers remember your site’s old address. If it’s set to a day, lower it at least a day before the move, so the switch to the new host spreads quickly.
- Get your analytics and ad reports working before you change anything. Otherwise you can’t tell whether the move helped.
- Test on mobile, more than once, and write down the date. Lighthouse scores move between runs and between versions, so compare like with like.
Where it stands now
Bold Leap now runs on Cloudflare, rebuilt in Astro (a website framework) in place of the old WordPress build. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tested the homepage on 9 October 2026, using Lighthouse 13.5.0:
- Desktop: 95 for performance.
- Mobile: 50, 62 and 59 across three runs, on an emulated Moto G Power over throttled 4G.
The server isn’t what holds the mobile score back. In the second mobile run, Lighthouse put the server’s share of the main content’s load time at 0 ms. In the first run, the biggest scripts loaded from other companies were the ads, Google’s analytics tag, the cookie consent message and Microsoft Clarity (a tool that records how visitors use the page).