A client rang me last year, fuming. His WordPress site had gone down again. Third time in four months. A plugin update had broken his contact form, his hosting was crawling, and he'd just found out his site had been flagged as compromised. He asked me to fix it. I told him I thought we should rebuild it instead.
That conversation wasn't unusual. I'd been having versions of it for a while. And it's what finally pushed me to stop defaulting to WordPress for every project that came through the door.
WordPress Isn't Bad
I want to be clear — I'm not bashing WordPress. I built sites on it for years. It powers a huge chunk of the web and for good reason. The ecosystem is massive, clients can log in and edit their own content, WooCommerce gives you a full shop out of the box, and there's a plugin for basically anything you can think of.
For the right project, it's still the right tool. I'll come back to that.
But somewhere along the way, WordPress became the default answer to every web design brief in Bradford — and everywhere else. Need a five-page brochure site? WordPress. Need a landing page? WordPress. Need a blog with ten posts? WordPress. And that's where the problems start.
Where It Started Falling Apart
A simple five-page business website doesn't need a database. It doesn't need PHP. It doesn't need thirty plugins to do what a few lines of code could handle. But that's what WordPress gives you, whether you need it or not.
The problems I kept running into with client sites:
Speed. Most WordPress sites I audited for Bradford businesses scored somewhere between 30 and 60 on Google's PageSpeed test on mobile. That's not good enough when speed directly affects your rankings and conversions. The bloat from themes, plugins, and database queries adds up fast.
Security. WordPress is the most targeted CMS on the internet. Not because it's insecure by design, but because it's everywhere and most installations aren't maintained properly. I wrote a whole post on WordPress security basics because I was tired of cleaning up hacked sites. Outdated plugins, weak passwords, cheap hosting — the same story every time.
Maintenance. Every WordPress site needs regular updates — core, themes, plugins. Skip a few months and you're asking for trouble. Most small business owners don't do this. They set it and forget it, then wonder why things break. That means either paying someone for ongoing maintenance or accepting the risk.
Plugin dependency. Need a contact form? Plugin. Need SEO basics? Plugin. Need caching? Plugin. Need security? Plugin. Each one adds code, potential conflicts, and another thing that can break on update. I've seen sites with 40+ plugins for functionality that shouldn't need any of them.
What Astro Changed
Astro is a modern web framework that takes a completely different approach. Instead of generating pages dynamically from a database every time someone visits, it builds your entire site as static HTML files at build time. The result is a site that's just... files. No database, no PHP, no server-side processing on every page load.
The difference in practice:
A brochure site I rebuilt from WordPress to Astro went from a 42 PageSpeed score on mobile to 96. Same content, same images (properly optimised), same hosting provider. The WordPress version had a theme, a page builder, and about fifteen plugins. The Astro version has none of that overhead.
Load times dropped from 4+ seconds to under 1.5. That matters for SEO in Bradford and everywhere else — Google has been clear that page speed is a ranking factor, especially on mobile.
Security issues essentially disappeared. There's no database to inject into, no login page to brute force, no plugins to exploit. The attack surface went from wide open to almost nothing.
Maintenance went from "update everything monthly or risk breaking" to "it just sits there working." I update content when clients need changes, rebuild, deploy. That's it.
When I Still Use WordPress
WordPress still wins in specific situations. If a client needs an online shop, WooCommerce is hard to beat without spending significantly more on a custom solution. If they need to publish content daily and want to log in and do it themselves without calling me, WordPress with a good setup makes sense.
Some clients also just know WordPress. They've used it before, they're comfortable with the dashboard, and they don't want to learn something new. Fair enough. I'll build them a solid WordPress site — properly secured, properly optimised, properly maintained. No page builders, no theme bloat.
But for the majority of small businesses I work with in web development around Bradford — the ones who need a clean, fast site that represents their business and brings in enquiries — Astro makes more sense. Less to go wrong, better performance, lower ongoing costs.
What Clients Actually Notice
They don't care about the technology. Nobody's rung me excited about static site generation. What they notice:
Their site loads fast. Really fast. On their phone, on dodgy Wi-Fi, everywhere.
Their Google rankings improved. Faster sites with clean code and proper structure tend to do well. Combined with decent SEO, the results speak for themselves.
They stopped getting "your site is down" emails. No more plugin conflicts, no more hacked sites, no more mystery errors after an update they didn't ask for.
They spend less on maintenance. No monthly plugin updates, no security monitoring subscriptions, no emergency fixes at ten o'clock on a Friday night.
The Bottom Line
I haven't abandoned WordPress. I've just stopped treating it as the default for every website design project that lands on my desk. The right tool depends on the job, and for most small business sites, a lighter, faster, more secure approach gets better results.
If your WordPress site is slow, constantly breaking, or costing you more in maintenance than it's worth — it might not need fixing. It might need rethinking.
