A client came to me last year with a pretty standard problem. Their WordPress site was slow, the hosting was costing them £15 a month for a five-page brochure site, and every time they needed a text change, they had to either figure out the page builder or pay someone to do it. The site scored 38 on Google's PageSpeed Insights on mobile. Not unusual — most WordPress sites I audit around Bradford land somewhere between 30 and 60.
I suggested rebuilding it in Astro. They'd never heard of it. Most people haven't. But the results spoke for themselves.
The Before
Their WordPress setup was typical. A premium theme, Elementor for page building, Yoast for SEO, WP Rocket for caching, Wordfence for security, a contact form plugin, a cookie notice plugin, and a handful of others I've already forgotten. About twenty plugins in total for a site with five pages and no blog.
Every page load meant a database query, PHP processing, and a stack of JavaScript and CSS from plugins they didn't even know were there. The homepage was loading 3.2MB of resources. For five pages of text and a few photos.
Hosting was a managed WordPress plan — £15 a month. Not extortionate, but not nothing for a small business that barely touched the site. And they still had the usual headaches: plugin updates breaking things, the occasional security scare, and a site that felt sluggish on mobile.
The Rebuild
I rebuilt the site in Astro over about a week. Same content, same design — actually improved the design a bit while I was at it — but completely different under the hood.
Astro builds static HTML at build time. No database, no PHP, no server-side processing when someone visits. The browser gets clean HTML, optimised CSS, and only the JavaScript it actually needs — which for a brochure site is almost none.
Images went through Astro's built-in image optimisation. Automatically converted to WebP, properly sized for different screens, lazy loaded below the fold. No plugin needed. It just does it.
The contact form runs through a simple serverless function. No plugin, no database, no attack surface.
The Numbers
This is the bit that matters.
| WordPress | Astro | |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed (mobile) | 38 | 97 |
| Page load time | 4.2s | 0.8s |
| Total page weight | 3.2MB | 280KB |
| Requests | 47 | 8 |
| Plugins/dependencies | 20+ | 0 |
| Monthly hosting cost | £15 | £0 |
That last line isn't a typo. The Astro site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. For a static site with normal traffic, it's completely free. No server to maintain, no PHP to patch, no database to back up. Cloudflare handles the CDN, SSL, and deployment. The site loads from the nearest edge server to whoever's visiting — which for most of their customers in Bradford means it's served from a data centre practically down the road.
Keystatic for Content
The one thing WordPress genuinely does well is letting clients edit their own content. I wasn't going to take that away.
I set up Keystatic as the content management system. It gives the client a clean, simple editing interface — way simpler than the WordPress dashboard, honestly. They can update text, swap images, publish blog posts if they ever start one. No page builder to wrestle with, no widgets, no Gutenberg blocks vs classic editor confusion.
The content is stored as flat files in the repository. No database. When they hit save, it triggers a rebuild and the updated site deploys automatically to Cloudflare Pages. Takes about thirty seconds from save to live.
They said it was easier than WordPress. I nearly fell off my chair.
Maintenance
This is where the real difference hits for small businesses.
WordPress needs constant attention. Core updates, theme updates, plugin updates — skip a few months and you're either insecure or something breaks. I've seen sites go down because an automatic plugin update conflicted with another plugin at 3am on a Sunday. That's what you get with twenty moving parts.
The Astro site has had zero maintenance issues since launch. There's nothing to update on the server because there is no server. The code is clean, minimal, and doesn't depend on a chain of third-party plugins to function. When the client needs changes, I make them, push, done.
No emergency calls. No "my site's been hacked." No "something looks weird on mobile since yesterday." It just works.
What It Cost Them
The rebuild was a one-off cost — comparable to what they'd have paid for a decent WordPress redesign. The difference is what happens after.
No hosting fees. No maintenance retainer. No plugin licence renewals. No security monitoring subscriptions. Over three years, the savings on hosting alone cover a chunk of the build cost. Factor in the maintenance they're not paying for, and the Astro site is significantly cheaper to own.
And it's faster, more secure, and easier to update. Not a bad trade.
When This Doesn't Work
I'm not pretending Astro replaces WordPress for everything. If this client had needed an online shop, I'd have used WooCommerce or Shopify. If they needed fifty pages of dynamic content with user logins and membership areas, different conversation entirely.
But for a small business website — the kind most businesses in Bradford actually need — the WordPress stack is overkill. You're paying for complexity you don't use, maintaining software you don't understand, and getting worse performance because of it.
The Takeaway
This isn't about technology tribalism. I don't care what framework powers your site. What I care about is whether it's fast, secure, easy to maintain, and not costing you more than it should.
For this client, moving from WordPress to Astro on Cloudflare Pages meant a faster site, better SEO, zero hosting costs, and no more late-night emergency fixes. That's not a technical achievement — it's just a better outcome for their business.
If your current site isn't giving you that, it might be worth a conversation.
