I Moved My Site Off WordPress (As a WordPress Developer)

I’ve spent fourteen years building on WordPress. I write custom plugins for a living, I lead a team that ships WooCommerce stores every month, and I still think WordPress is the right answer for most businesses.

So it feels a little strange to say this: my own site no longer runs on it.

The problem wasn’t WordPress

My old site was a Bricks Builder site on shared hosting. It worked. But when I looked at it honestly, I was paying — in money, in updates and in page weight — for a CMS I barely used.

• Five pages and a blog that I update a few times a year.
• Plugins to keep patched for features I didn’t need: forms, SEO, caching, security.
• A database and PHP runtime sitting behind pages that never change between visits.

For a client with a catalogue, an editorial team and a checkout, that stack earns its keep. For a personal portfolio, it was overhead.

What I moved to

The new site is built with Astro and deployed on Cloudflare Pages:

• Static HTML by default. Every page is pre-built at deploy time, so there’s no server to render and nothing to hack. It loads fast from Cloudflare’s edge anywhere in the world.
• Content as files. Services, clients and my work history live in one typed data file. Blog posts — including this one — are Markdown files in Git, so every change has history and can be rolled back.
• SEO built in, not bolted on. Canonical tags, Open Graph, JSON-LD for my profile, services and posts, an auto-generated sitemap and RSS feed — all generated on every build.
• An llms.txt file. A plain-text summary of who I am and what I do, rebuilt automatically, so AI assistants can read the site as easily as search engines.
• A contact form without a plugin. A small Cloudflare Pages Function checks Cloudflare Turnstile and sends the message through Brevo’s API.

Hosting cost went from a monthly bill to effectively zero.

What I kept from the old site

Moving platforms is where most sites quietly lose their rankings, so I treated it like a client migration:

• Old blog URLs 301-redirect to their new homes, and posts keep their original publish dates.
• Page titles and descriptions were rewritten, not dropped.
• Images were compressed and served at the right sizes.

So should you leave WordPress?

Probably not — and that’s the honest answer I give clients too.

If you run a store, publish often with a team, or need editors who never touch code, WordPress (or Shopify) is still the better tool. That’s the work I do every day, and it isn’t going anywhere.

But if you’re a developer with a portfolio, a small brochure site or a documentation hub, a static site on a free edge host is hard to beat: faster, cheaper and one less thing to update at 2am.

The real lesson isn’t “WordPress vs Astro”. It’s the same one I apply to client work: build the system the job actually needs, not the one you’re used to.

Thinking about a migration of your own — to Astro, from WooCommerce to Shopify, or the other way round? Let’s talk.