New static site? Workers with static assets, not Pages

The answer. In 2024 Pages was the way to host a site and Workers were for code. That has flipped. A Worker with assets.directory serves files for free exactly as Pages does, and adds what Pages lacks: Durable Objects, Cron Triggers, Queues consumers, Workers Logs and traces, gradual deployments, unlimited named environments instead of preview/production, and run_worker_first middleware. Cloudflare's own guidance is now "start new projects with Workers"; Pages keeps working and still has its Git-integrated build UI, but new features land on Workers. Migrating an existing Pages project is mostly renaming pages_build_output_dir to assets.directory and, if you have a functions/ folder, letting Wrangler compile it into a Worker.

The pattern.

// before (Pages)                       // after (Workers with static assets)
{ "name": "site",                       { "name": "site",
  "pages_build_output_dir": "./dist" }    "compatibility_date": "2026-09-01",
                                          "assets": { "directory": "./dist", "not_found_handling": "404-page" } }

npx wrangler deploy                       # asset-only Worker: no main, no invocation charges
npx wrangler pages project delete site    # only after traffic has moved and the custom domain is re-pointed

Watch out.

Pages preview deployments are branch-keyed; Workers get that through Workers Builds' non-production branch builds, with less configurability.
Workers custom domains require Cloudflare-managed nameservers; Pages accepted external DNS.
The _headers and _redirects files are honored by Workers static assets too, so a migration does not lose them.