Many years ago, I cut my web development teeth on WordPress and I’ve been using it for my personal website for years. Recently, I decided to transition my personal website from WordPress to Astro—a modern static site generator built on JavaScript. Here’s why I made the switch and how it aligns with my experience and expectations.

Why I Made the Switch

Performance and Speed

WordPress uses server-side rendering, executing PHP and querying databases for each page request. For a small, mostly static site like mine, this approach adds unnecessary complexity and slows performance.

Astro, being a static site generator, compiles all pages at build time into HTML, CSS, and minimal JavaScript. This dramatically improves load times since there’s no runtime server-side processing or database queries. Deploying static assets to hosting platforms like Cloudflare Pages further optimizes site speed and simplifies maintenance.

Flexibility and Customization

WordPress provides countless plugins and themes but often at the cost of bloated codebases, potential security vulnerabilities, and increased maintenance efforts. While custom development within WordPress is possible, it typically demands substantial additional time and effort.

Astro offers granular control over which JavaScript libraries and frameworks—such as React or Vue—I incorporate. By default, Astro includes no unnecessary JavaScript, enabling me to build precisely the lightweight, secure, and maintainable site I need.

Scalability and Reduced Maintenance

With WordPress, regular updates and security patches for core, themes, plugins, and underlying infrastructure are essential yet cumbersome. Maintenance overhead grows exponentially as more plugins or complex integrations are introduced.

Static sites built with Astro simplify deployment significantly. The generated static files require minimal upkeep, freeing me from constant updates and compatibility checks while easily scaling the site as needed.

SEO and Accessibility

Improving SEO or accessibility with WordPress generally means installing additional plugins, complicating management and potentially impacting performance. Without careful upfront consideration by theme authors, integrating accessibility standards later becomes challenging.

Astro simplifies these aspects by embedding SEO and accessibility best practices directly within HTML templates. This streamlined approach ensures excellent SEO performance and inclusive accessibility from the outset, aligning with my focus on quality and usability.

Considerations Before Switching

Usability for Content Creators

Astro, unlike WordPress, lacks an intuitive interface such as Gutenberg. WordPress excels in ease-of-use for content creators without coding skills. Astro, however, requires familiarity with HTML, CSS, JSX, and JavaScript.

Summary

Switching from WordPress to Astro significantly boosted my site’s performance, flexibility, and maintainability. While WordPress remains essential for certain scenarios, Astro perfectly meets my current requirements as an experienced engineering leader.

Selecting the right tool for each project is critical. Astro is a powerful addition to my toolkit, complementing WordPress where appropriate.