I’ll start with the honest part: WordPress is not evil. It powered a huge part of the web for twenty years, and for some projects it is still a reasonable choice.
But for the sites I build today — clinics, restaurants, shops, events, local businesses in Crete — I stopped reaching for it. I build with Astro instead. Here’s the reasoning.
1. Speed you don’t have to fight for
A typical WordPress site builds every page on request: run PHP, query the database, load a theme, load a dozen plugins, then send the HTML. Making that fast means caching plugins, optimisation plugins, and a lot of tuning.
An Astro site does that work once, when the site is built. What visitors get is plain, ready HTML with only the JavaScript a page actually needs — often none at all.
The result is a site that is fast by default, not fast after a weekend of optimisation. And speed is not a vanity metric: people leave slow pages, especially on mobile data, and Google notices.
2. Far less to break, far less to hack
Every WordPress plugin is someone else’s code running on your server. Each one needs updates; each update can conflict with another; and outdated plugins are one of the most common ways sites get hacked.
A static Astro site has no database to break into and no admin login to brute-force. There’s simply much less there. For a small business that doesn’t have a developer on call, that matters more than any feature.
3. Built for this business, not adapted from a theme
With a theme, you start from someone else’s design and bend it until it roughly fits. With a custom site, the layout, colours and structure are made for this business and these customers — the clinic’s opening hours where patients look for them, the restaurant’s menu readable on a phone in the sun.
Custom used to mean expensive and slow. It doesn’t anymore.
4. “Custom” is fast now
This is the part that changed everything for me. Working with Claude and AI agents every day, a custom Astro site that would once have taken weeks now takes hours to a few days — properly built, responsive, with clean code.
So the old trade-off — template = cheap, custom = expensive — mostly disappears. You can have a site made for you, without the WordPress overhead, in about the same time as setting up a theme.
5. You own it, and it’s easy to host
An Astro site is a folder of files. It can be hosted almost anywhere, cheaply, and it can live in a Git repository where every change is tracked and reversible. This site, for example, is deployed automatically: I push a change, it’s built and online a minute later.
When I’d still pick WordPress
To be fair, there are cases:
- the client already has a big WordPress site and a team that knows it,
- they need a specific plugin ecosystem (complex memberships, LMS, etc.),
- many non-technical editors publish content daily and want the familiar admin.
Even then, there are often better options — a headless CMS in front of an Astro site, for example — but those are the honest exceptions.
The short version
For a typical small-business site, I want three things: fast, safe, and made for the business. Astro gives me all three with less effort than WordPress gives me any one of them.
Curious what that looks like in practice? Some of the sites I’ve built are on my home page — and if you’d like one, let’s talk.