I built my first websites on WordPress. This blog ran on WordPress for somewhere north of a decade. I’m still fond of it. But a few months ago I rebuilt the whole thing on Astro, and I haven’t looked back.

This is the story of why.

The thing that finally pushed me

WordPress wasn’t broken. That’s not why I moved. It was the maintenance tax.

Every few weeks I’d log in to find: PHP version update warnings, plugin updates, theme updates, a security patch, a plugin that hadn’t been updated by its author in two years and was now flagging as a risk. None of it was hard individually. All of it added up.

I write about a dozen posts a year. The ratio of “time spent maintaining the site” to “time spent writing on the site” had crept up to something embarrassing. So I started looking around.

Why Astro, specifically

I looked at the usual suspects: Next.js, Eleventy, Hugo, Gatsby (RIP). Astro won on a few axes that mattered to me:

• It generates static HTML by default. No runtime, no PHP, no database queries on every page load. The output is files. Files are easy.
• Zero JavaScript unless I ask for it. Most pages on a personal blog don’t need any. Astro ships none by default and lets me opt in to React or Svelte islands where I need interactivity.
• Markdown content with proper frontmatter. My old posts came out of WordPress as messy HTML soup. Astro happily eats Markdown, which means going forward I’m writing in plain text files in a git repo, not a CMS.
• It got out of my way. No opinionated routing, no required state library, no framework lock-in.

I deploy the built site to Cloudflare Pages. End to end, a git push to a live update takes about 30 seconds.

What I gave up

Honest list, because it’s not all upside:

• The WordPress editor. Love it or hate it, Gutenberg is genuinely good for non-technical writers. If my wife wanted to publish a post tomorrow, she could on WordPress. On Astro she’d need to write Markdown, commit, and push. That’s a tradeoff that works for me but wouldn’t work for everyone.
• Plugins for everything. Want a contact form? You’re writing it. Want comments? Pick a third-party service. Want analytics? Drop in a script. WordPress had a one-click solution for all of these.
• The dashboard. I miss the dashboard, a little. Mostly I don’t.

Was it worth it

For me, yes. The site is faster, costs less, and I haven’t applied a security update in months because there’s nothing to patch. Writing posts feels lighter. I open VS Code instead of a browser tab.

WordPress is still the right answer for plenty of sites. If you’re running a small business that needs e-commerce, contact forms, a booking system, and a blog, and you want one person to manage the whole thing from a browser, WordPress is still excellent at that.

But for a personal blog written by an engineer who already lives in a terminal? Astro fits like a glove.