WordPress vs. Astro: Which Should You Build Your Client’s Site On?

Every new project starts with the same question: what do we build it on? For most agency work, it comes down to two options, WordPress or Astro.

It’s tempting to have a default. One platform you reach for every time, because it’s familiar and the last project went fine. But the right answer changes from client to client, and picking wrong is expensive. Choose a platform that fights the brief and you’ll feel it at every stage: the build, the handover, the first content update, the year-two redesign.

So here’s how we actually decide, and how you can too.

The short version

If your client needs to publish and edit content regularly, and non-technical people will be doing it, WordPress is usually the right call.

If the site is mostly fixed, the priority is speed and security, and content changes are occasional, Astro is usually the right call.

That covers most projects. But “usually” is doing a lot of work in those two sentences, so let’s get into what actually tips the decision.

What WordPress is good at

WordPress powers around 40% of all websites, and not by accident. Its real strength is that clients can run their own site without calling a developer every time they want to change a headline.

It’s the right choice when:

• Your client publishes often. Blogs, news, events, case studies, product updates, anything with a steady stream of new content plays to WordPress’s strengths.
• Non-technical people need to edit. A marketing manager can add a page, swap an image, or update copy from a familiar dashboard.
• The site needs to grow in ways you can’t fully predict. Memberships, e-commerce, gated content, complex forms, there’s a well-trodden path for most of it.

The catch is that WordPress rewards discipline and punishes shortcuts. Loaded up with a page builder and a stack of plugins, it gets slow, fragile, and hard to maintain. Built properly, hand-coded, lean, only the plugins you actually need, it stays fast and holds up for years. The platform isn’t the problem. How it’s built is.

What Astro is good at

Astro is a modern framework built around a simple idea: ship as little to the browser as possible. It generates static HTML by default, which makes sites that are exceptionally fast, secure, and cheap to host.

It’s the right choice when:

• Speed is the point. Astro sites load almost instantly and score well on Core Web Vitals out of the box. For a brand where the site is the first impression, that matters.
• The content is fairly stable. Marketing sites, portfolios, campaign microsites, product launches, pages that change occasionally rather than daily.
• Security and reliability are priorities. A static site has almost no attack surface. There’s no database to breach, no admin login to brute-force, far less to keep patched.

The trade-off is editing. Out of the box, Astro doesn’t hand your client a dashboard. If they want to manage content themselves, you need to pair it with a CMS, which is straightforward, but it’s a decision to make deliberately, not an afterthought.

The questions that actually decide it

Forget the platforms for a moment. These are the questions we ask on every project, and the answers point clearly to one or the other.

Who edits the site, and how often? If the client’s team updates content weekly and none of them are technical, lean WordPress. If updates are occasional and can run through you, Astro is on the table.

How much content, and how structured is it? A five-page brochure site is a different problem to a 500-article knowledge base. High volume and rich structure tend to favour a CMS.

How important is raw speed? Both can be fast. But if the client is obsessive about performance, or their audience is on patchy mobile connections, Astro gives you a head start that’s hard to beat.

What’s the budget, build and ongoing? WordPress carries maintenance: updates, security patches, plugin management. Astro carries almost none, but changes to content structure usually come back to a developer. Neither is “cheaper” in the abstract; it depends on where the client wants to spend.

How long does this site need to last? For something that’ll be redesigned in eighteen months, optimise for build speed. For a site meant to run for years, optimise for maintainability and low overhead.

You don’t always have to choose

There’s a third option worth knowing about: Astro with a headless CMS.

You get Astro’s speed and security on the front end, and your client gets a proper editing dashboard on the back. It’s a strong fit for content-heavy sites where performance still can’t slip, the best of both, at the cost of a slightly more involved setup.

It isn’t right for every project. But when a client says “I want it blisteringly fast and I want to edit it myself,” this is usually the honest answer.

How we’d approach it

We don’t start with the platform. We start with the client, how they work, what they’ll need to change, what success looks like a year from now. The right technology falls out of those answers, and we’d rather spend an hour getting the decision right than years working around a rushed one.

That’s the part that’s easy to skip when you’re busy running an agency, and it’s exactly the part we’re here to take off your plate. If you’ve got a project coming up and you’re weighing your options, let’s talk it through. No pitch, just a straight answer on what we’d build it on and why.