31–40 of 106 posts
To me the latter is a legit move and much cleaner architecture for most sites. And the issue of editing code, or really just markdown files, seems to be a solvable UI problem with good editors like Obsidian, or something similar but more tailored for website building.
There is a reason why Wordpress is (open source!) dominating the space ever since or more precisely, many niches.
To be honest, I had my fair share of "You might not need Wordpress" but in the end, nothing beats its versatility, its rights management and options. There is always a plugin for that.
I see no conntenter. Astro has its merits and use case - so have plenty of others (remember Hugo etc.?).
At a certain time you will hit a threshold or problems that are easy to solve using WP you usually disregard at the beginning.
I usually start out "No, WP isn't needed, just to regret it afterwards." There is a dilemma because customers only start to really utilize their website the moment it is setup. And it always went from "Just 5 pages" to "Can I add a marketplace?" to ballooning content as well as timed postings and social media integration.
I stopped questioning WP, because I really don't see alternatives in certain spaces.
Security is a concern, yes, but nevertheless, let's not talk about NodeJS in this regard.
Wordpress isn't a paradigm, it just works and while it seems to be some 20 years old odd code, quite many of the CMS in the React space struggled hard to getting to terms with the lastest paradigm shifts.
Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.
So paraphrase IBM: No one gets fires for using WordPress.
And I would not say this about any other CMS. They are incredible hard, you have to get a lot of stuff right. But I won't implement my own CMS again. At a certain time everybody will come to this realization, most likely, when you have a deadline and miss out features that are hard to implement.
This is my opinion and I love playing and toying around with CMS ever since, even forums (phpBB?) or DIGG clones like Pligg back then. Great stuff, but I stick to WP.
I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…
What do you use to edit texts on a dashboard or cms? My wife needed a website. I’m not much of a frontend coder but I looked at the price of squarespace for a year and decided to go that route with AI. Website is Astro. I easily update sophisticated designs with Claude or Gemini cli. Hosted for free on cloudflare, it’s super fast. Any git update deploys to the website in a minute. Got an hosted email form with astro…
I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems. I expect we'll see a further…
> and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) Is that really such a problem for the average Joe? I'm running multiple blogs via a Rust CMS [1] on the cheapest Hetzner server, and have had no problems with the scrapers or load or anything. Have also gotten to the HN front page without issues talking about that you shouldn't put a site behind Cloudflare sin…
I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…
Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that.
> static site
There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides.
There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.
I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…
> But 95% of web does not need it. Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. > static site There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides. There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on…
They're asserting you can do that stuff yourself now.
> There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on Wordpress and any of the 'better' cmses out there.
First, those are large orgs. Most WP sites are not that large or complicated.
Second, would those orgs use WP if they started fresh today? Or something like OP's setup?
If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot.
But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.
That's a very different scenario.
So please, if you're going to make sweeping statements on a CMS, please clarify if you're talking about a solo site owner situation or a multi-user setup.
There is indeed not always a need for WordPress. I have been using ProcessWire (1) for over a decade. Open-source, zero dependencies, no-nonsense CMS — and when it comes time to build a new website, I go back to it even in 2026, because you make it once and it works for 10 years and counting. Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>founder of Yoast SEO, >wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro >he’s since migrated again to EmDash Do you need to know anything more about this guy? If that's one of the articles sources, I think you can ignore anything it says.
Yoast SEO is a huge paid plugin for Wordpress, so the founder not using Wordpress is at least moderately interesting, in a "cobbler buys shoes at walmart" kind of way.
I have built a product which uses AI to built Astro sites. LLM builds the sites in steps and make sure that they get 100/100 scores in pagespeed insights. These sites are served with a CDN. You can edit the sites with LLM interface, or use markdown editor to edit sites, or edit texts directly on a dashboard. These sites are static. There is no vendor lock in. If you want to migrate and manage yourself, just go to clo…
> But 95% of web does not need it. Literally talking without knowledge here. There is always something that can be added with a Wordpress plugin and there is somebody who needs that. > static site There is no magic to that. You can make any Wordpress site basically static with one single plugin without losing any feature Wordpress provides. There is a reason why NASA, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters et al are all on…