Why I'm Moving Client Websites From WordPress to Astro

I built morlandappraisals.org in WordPress in 2020. It did its job for years. It took a North Bay appraisal firm that had run on word of mouth since the late 1980s and made it findable online, with inquiries coming in after hours instead of only through referrals. Nobody complained about it. And I still rebuilt it this year on a completely different platform.

Here’s why, and what the numbers look like now that the new site is live.

The short version

Every WordPress site I manage is a small machine that needs constant attention. Core updates, theme updates, plugin updates, PHP version bumps, security patches, a database that needs backing up, and a hosting plan big enough to run all of it. None of that makes the phone ring for the business that owns the site. It just keeps the site from breaking.

Astro is a different way of building a website. Instead of assembling each page on a server every time someone visits, every page is built ahead of time and served as plain HTML from a network of servers close to the visitor. There’s no database to query, no admin panel, and no plugins to patch. For most small business sites, that’s all the site ever needed to be.

I moved stealthdigital.ca over a while ago. Morland Real Estate Appraisals was my test case for client sites, and I picked it on purpose: a real business, a site I built myself, and small enough to be a clean test.

What changed for Morland

The content stayed word for word. The design got a refresh (a black and gold visual system and cleaner typography, built for mobile first), but the structure and the pages people already knew stayed put. Every old URL redirects permanently to its new home in a single hop, including the old sitemap files, so nothing was lost in search. The rebuild also added LocalBusiness structured data, unique titles and descriptions on every page, social preview images and a clean XML sitemap.

Under the hood, everything changed.

The old site had grown plugin-heavy, the way most WordPress sites do: a page builder with its Pro add-on, a forms plugin, an SEO plugin, and a steady stream of updates for all of them. The login page took regular bot attacks. The new site lives in a version-controlled repository, builds every page ahead of time, and is served from Vercel’s global network with a firewall in front of it. Images are delivered through Cloudinary, which resizes and compresses them for whatever device is loading the page. The client reviewed a staging link, approved it, and the swap to the live domain was a DNS change.

The numbers

Here’s the home page, WordPress versus Astro.

Home page	WordPress	Astro
External scripts	15	0
External stylesheets	23	0
Compressed page size	102 KB	9 KB

On Google’s PageSpeed Insights mobile test, which is the one that matters for a local service business, the new site scores 100 for Performance, 100 for Accessibility, 100 for Best Practices and 100 for SEO. First content painted at 0.9 seconds, the largest element visible at 1.7 seconds, zero blocking time, zero layout shift. Desktop scores the same 100 across the board.

Those aren’t numbers you tune your way to on a plugin-heavy WordPress site. The page simply doesn’t ship the weight anymore.

If you want the full breakdown of the build, it’s in the Morland Appraisals case study.

Why now

Rebuilding a site on a new platform used to be a big enough job that it only made sense when the site was due for a redesign anyway. That’s changed. The hosting, image handling and deployment pieces that make a static site easy to run have matured, and my own build process has gotten a lot faster. A migration that keeps the existing content is now a much smaller job than a redesign, which means it makes sense for sites that would never have justified a rebuild before.

I used Morland to time the whole process end to end, so I know what a migration actually costs before I quote one to the next client.

What the client gets out of it

Speed, first. Buyers on phones don’t wait, and Google has been clear for years that page experience is part of how it ranks a site.

Security, second. There’s no login page to attack, no plugin with a vulnerability to patch, and no database to steal. The entire attack surface that WordPress sites deal with simply doesn’t exist. On Morland, the firewall blocked thousands of bot requests in the site’s first day live. On the old site, those would have been hitting a WordPress login page.

Lower running costs, third. No premium plugin licences to renew (the old site’s page builder alone had a paid Pro add-on), and no hosting plan sized for PHP and a database.

And less of my time on maintenance, which is time I’d rather spend on the things that actually generate leads for a client: their Google Business Profile, their ads, their content.

There’s one more benefit that’s easy to overlook. Because the site is code in a repository, every change is tracked. If something goes wrong, rolling back is one click. Every change gets a preview link before it goes live, so the client can look at it on their phone and say yes or no. That’s a better approval process than “log in and hope the update didn’t break the header.”

Who this isn’t for

I’d rather tell you this up front than have you find out after you’ve paid for it.

If you update your own site every week (blog posts, staff changes, job postings), WordPress’s editor is a real advantage. On an Astro site without a content management system, edits go through me. For most trades and professional service sites, content changes a few times a year, and that works fine. If you need more than that, we’d add a content system on top, and that changes the cost.

If your site runs on live data feeds, the move is a bigger project. One site I manage pulls in real estate listings automatically. That one is going to take real planning before I touch it, and I’m not rushing it.

If you sell products online, this isn’t the tool for you (and I don’t build e-commerce sites anyway).

Contact forms work differently, since there’s no server sitting behind the site. On Morland, the form runs as a small serverless function with spam protection, rate limiting and bot filtering built in, and sends through an email service. Not a problem, just a different approach.

What’s next

Every WordPress site I manage is on the list. I’m doing them one at a time as the timing makes sense for each client, and tearing down each old install as its replacement goes live.

If your site is on WordPress and you’ve wondered whether it’s holding you back, the quickest test is to run it through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. If the score comes back orange or red, I’m happy to look at it with you and tell you whether a move makes sense, or whether there’s a cheaper fix.

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