We have built WordPress sites for well over a decade. Most of the projects in our portfolio run on it, and some of them we still maintain. In September 2026 we moved our own site off WordPress to Astro. This is the comparison we wish we had read before deciding. It is written for the people who pay for a company website and live with it afterwards, not for developers choosing a hobby stack.
The short answer
If your website is mostly content that changes a few times a month (who you are, what you offer, case studies, a blog), a static Astro site is faster, cheaper to run and has almost nothing to maintain.
If the website is an application (a shop, a membership area, bookings, or a newsroom where many editors publish every day in the WordPress admin), WordPress is still the practical choice.
Most company websites are the first kind but run on the second kind of tool.
What each one actually is
WordPress is a content management system. Every time someone opens a page, a server runs PHP, reads the database and assembles the page. Themes and plugins add features. That flexibility is why it runs so much of the web, and it is also why it needs regular updates.
Astro is a web framework that builds your pages ahead of time. The result is plain HTML files, generated once when the site is published and then served as they are. By default it sends no JavaScript to the browser unless a component needs it. Content lives in files (Markdown or MDX) or comes from a headless CMS.
Side by side
| WordPress | Astro (static) | |
|---|---|---|
| What runs when a page loads | PHP and a database | Nothing: the page is already built |
| What the visitor downloads | Theme, plugin scripts and styles | The HTML and CSS the page uses |
| Weekly upkeep | Core, theme and plugin updates | None, apart from the site’s own changes |
| Attack surface | Admin login, plugins, database | Static files, plus any form endpoint |
| Editing | WordPress admin, familiar to many | Files in Git, or a headless CMS |
| E-commerce, members, bookings | Mature plugins (WooCommerce and others) | Needs a separate service or backend |
| Hosting | PHP host with a database | Any static host, or a small server |
Speed
When we moved our own site, we measured the homepage of both versions from the same machine, each with its analytics running (Google Analytics on WordPress, our self-hosted Umami on Astro):
- page weight dropped from 323 KB to 121 KB
- requests from 18 to 13
- JavaScript files from 7 to 1, and that one is the analytics
- Largest Contentful Paint on desktop from 652 ms to 268 ms
The full numbers and method are in the case study.
A carefully built WordPress site can be fast too. We have built several. The difference is that on WordPress speed is something you defend: every new plugin, font or tracking script chips away at it. On a static site the fast version is the default.
Maintenance and security
This is where most of the long-term cost hides. A WordPress site needs its core, theme and plugins updated, ideally tested on staging first, and someone has to notice when an update breaks something. The admin login and every plugin are part of what an attacker can try.
A static site has no admin to log into, no database to inject into and no plugins to patch. What remains is the site’s own code and, if it has one, a contact-form endpoint. For a marketing site that is a much smaller thing to look after.
Editing: the real trade-off
This is the honest downside of a static site. With WordPress your team logs in and edits a page. With Astro there are three options:
- Someone else makes the changes. For a site that changes a few times a month this is often the cheapest option overall. Our static site subscription is €49 / month.
- Your team edits Markdown files in Git. This works well for technical teams and is awkward for everyone else.
- A headless CMS. Editors get a proper admin; the site is still built as static pages. This costs more to set up, which is why a headless site starts at from €6,000 with us.
If several people publish every day and rely on WordPress workflows, that is a strong reason to stay.
SEO
Neither one ranks better by itself. Google ranks pages, not frameworks. What matters is content, speed and clean technical basics: titles, descriptions, headings, canonical URLs, structured data and a sitemap.
WordPress handles those basics through plugins. On an Astro site they are part of the build, so they cannot be switched off by a plugin conflict. The speed difference helps on mobile, where Core Web Vitals are hardest to pass.
The real SEO risk is the move itself. Change URLs without redirects and you lose what the old pages earned. Every old URL must either stay the same or permanently redirect to its new address, and the titles and descriptions have to move with the content.
Cost
Our own starting prices, to make this concrete:
- a business website on WordPress starts at from €4,000
- a static site on Astro starts at from €3,000
- a headless site with a CMS starts at from €6,000
The bigger difference is after launch. A WordPress site needs a care plan for updates and backups; ours start at €90 / month. A small static site is hosted and maintained for €49 / month. Over three years that gap is often larger than the difference in build price.
When WordPress is still the better choice
- You sell online and need a cart, stock and customer accounts.
- You run memberships, courses or bookings on existing plugins.
- Many editors publish every day and depend on the WordPress admin.
- You need a plugin-based feature that would take weeks to rebuild.
We still build and maintain WordPress sites for exactly these cases.
Five questions to decide
- How often does the content change: daily, or a few times a month?
- Who changes it, and would they miss the WordPress admin?
- Does the site sell, log people in, or take bookings?
- How much did updates, security fixes and slow pages cost you last year?
- Which pages bring in search traffic, and do you know their URLs?
If your answers are “a few times a month”, “one or two people”, “no”, “too much” and “yes”, a static site is probably the better fit.
Thinking about moving?
We move company and content sites from WordPress to Astro with every URL kept and the SEO carried over. See how the migration works and what it costs, or read how we moved our own site in eight days.