Abstract Using the Richards–Wolf formula, we investigate the tight focusing of a cylindrical vector beam of second order using a high-numerical aperture lens confined by a ring aperture. It is shown that the area of energy backflow can be enlarged by the ring aperture, and that focusing light using a lens with a numerical aperture of 0.95 and a ring aperture, which limits the angle of the entrance pupil to 0.9 of the maximum value, allows us to increase the depth of the area of negative values of the Poynting vector projection onto the optical axis by a factor of four, with a slightly varying width of the region (this varies from 0.357 to 0.352 of the wavelength of the focused light). The ratio of the absolute values of the Poynting vector for reverse and direct flows is increased by a factor of 2.5.