Astro vs WordPress
WordPress runs an enormous share of the web and most of those sites should stay on it. The question is whether yours is still a website or has quietly become a software project that somebody has to keep patched.
Pick the one the job wants.
Read both columns. The one that describes more of your week tells you where the pressure is coming from.
Stay on WordPress when
- Several authors publish often, and the editorial workflow is doing real work.
- A plugin nobody wants to reimplement is load bearing and well maintained.
- The site is transacted rather than published: memberships, commerce, forums.
- Somebody already owns the updates and it is not costing anybody a week.
Move to Astro when
- The plugin list has become the architecture, and nobody chose most of it.
- The weekly job is updating the site rather than publishing to it.
- You are paying for caching to undo work the platform is doing per request.
- The site is mostly read, and it is running a database to say so.
Often the answer is neither.
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Keep WordPress and fix the implementation
If the problem is an old theme, forty plugins or hosting nobody has looked at since 2019, fixing those is far cheaper than rebuilding the site and the fix lands this month.
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Keep WordPress as the CMS
If the editorial workflow is genuinely valuable and the front end is the problem, Astro can render the public site while WordPress stays behind it as the place people write.
Capability by capability.
| What is being compared | WordPress | Astro |
|---|---|---|
| Where the features come from | WordPress Plugins, including ones chosen years ago by somebody who left | Astro Written once, or a service the site talks to on purpose This is the row that decides most WordPress migrations. A site with four plugins is a short job. A site with forty is an audit before it is a rebuild, because each one is a decision somebody has to make again. |
| Themes and the design layer | WordPress A theme, a child theme, and often a page builder on top of both | Astro Components, with no theme underneath them Three layers of inheritance become one layer of markup. It is the part of a WordPress migration that looks like a redesign and is not one. |
| What you patch | WordPress Core, plugins, PHP, and the server they run on | Astro Dependencies, on your own schedule, with no admin login or database in front of them A statically built site removes the login page, the database and the request-time runtime, which is a real reduction in what is exposed. What it does not remove is the dependencies in the build, the host, the DNS and every third-party script on the page. Fewer things to patch, not nothing. |
| Publishing at volume | WordPress Multiple authors, scheduling, revisions and editorial states, built in | Astro Whatever the CMS you choose provides, and nothing by default WordPress is very good at this. If a newsroom runs on it, that is a reason to stay, or to keep WordPress headless and let Astro render the front end. |
| Extending it | WordPress Anything, if somebody writes PHP | Astro Anything, if somebody builds it. Static work happens at build time and dynamic routes run on demand where the project needs them |
Architecture
Four things that change when the site becomes a codebase.
Differences in how the site is worked on, not reasons on their own. If the case for staying on WordPress above still describes you, none of them is worth a migration.
Estimate your migration cost Compare Astro to every platform
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Security
The public attack surface gets much smaller
WordPress PHP a database an admin login the public web
Astro Files a CDN
A traditional WordPress site exposes PHP, a database-backed application and an admin login to the public web. A statically rendered Astro front end takes those out of the request path.
That is not maintenance-free and not invulnerable: dependencies, hosting, DNS and third-party services still have to be looked after. There is simply far less application infrastructure answering every request, and it is the difference people notice first in the year after the move.
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Plugins
The plugin list becomes a list of decisions
WordPress Plugin another plugin a plugin to fix those two forty
Astro Keep replace drop
Forms, redirects, SEO fields, galleries, popups and caching were each a plugin, and each is now kept, replaced with a service, or dropped because nobody has used it since 2022.
That audit is the migration. A site with four plugins is a short job and one with forty is a scoping exercise before it is a rebuild.
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Performance
Speed stops being something you buy
WordPress Render per request a caching plugin a CDN an optimizer
Astro Build once ship the page
A WordPress site can be extremely fast. Dynamic rendering, plugins and page builders add work that then gets managed with a caching plugin, then a CDN, then an optimizer to fix what the first two broke.
A statically rendered page starts from a simpler model: build it before the visitor asks, then ship only what that page needs. The plugins bought to make the old one fast come out with everything else.
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Content model
Custom post types get a model instead of a convention
WordPress Custom post type a plugin UI fields in another table
Astro Schema typed fields a build that fails on a missing one
A custom post type is a shape somebody defined in PHP or in a plugin UI, with fields in a separate table nobody documented.
Moving forces the model to be designed and typed, so a missing field fails a build instead of rendering an empty page nobody notices for a month.
Integrations
Changing the frontend doesn't mean changing your stack.
The site is one part of a marketing stack, and a migration that leaves the rest of it broken has not finished. Each of these is a deliberate integration with a guide behind it, rather than a script pasted into a header somewhere.
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HubSpot
Forms that land in the CRM as records, confirmed by the server rather than by the browser.
CRM
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Sanity
A content model the marketing team edits and the build renders, with no second copy of anything.
CMS
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Google Analytics
Traffic and conversions measured against the routes the site actually has.
Analytics
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Stripe
Checkout handled by Stripe, with the webhook as the record that decides what happened.
Payments
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Mailchimp
Signups that reach the audience exactly once, whatever the visitor clicks.
Email
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Zapier
Site events handed to the automations the team has already built.
Automation
WordPress and Astro, answered.
Is Astro better than WordPress?
It depends on what WordPress is doing for the site. For a site that is mostly read rather than transacted, Astro removes a large amount of runtime and maintenance infrastructure. For a site with several authors, a mature editorial workflow, or a plugin doing genuinely difficult work, WordPress may already be earning its complexity.
Can I keep WordPress as the CMS?
Yes, and it is often the best half-step. The front end becomes Astro and WordPress stays as a headless CMS behind it, so the editorial workflow survives untouched while the public site stops being a server. It is also reversible in a way a full move is not.
What happens to my plugins?
Each one becomes an explicit decision. Forms and SEO fields have direct equivalents, some plugins become a few lines of code, and some turn out to be doing nothing. The ones without an answer are the ones that decide whether this project is worth doing, and they are found in week one rather than week five.
How long does a WordPress migration take?
Three to six weeks for a typical site, longer than any other platform here. The reason is rarely the content: it is the URL archive, which includes category and tag archives, author pages, pagination and whatever permalink structure preceded the current one, and it is routinely larger than the site itself.
What about page builders like Elementor or Divi?
They are the expensive part. Builders store layout inside the post body as shortcodes and serialized markup, so the export contains it and the text has to be extracted from the layout rather than imported with it. Every page a builder touched is manual, and that is worth knowing before anybody quotes.
Reach out and see if we are a good fit.
Currently booking two to four weeks out.