Why we build with Astro instead of WordPress, and why it matters

At serpixel, we make a technical decision that surprises many: we don’t use WordPress. Not for us, and not for our clients. In a world where WordPress powers 40% of the web, choosing a different technology might seem risky. But when you see the numbers, you understand why more and more professionals are leaving WordPress behind and choosing Astro.

WordPress: the king that got old

Don’t get us wrong: WordPress was revolutionary. It democratized web creation and allowed millions of people to have an online presence. But the technology that was cutting-edge in 2010 has become a liability in 2026.

The real problems with WordPress

1. Speed: too slow for Google

A typical WordPress website with a popular template (Divi, Elementor, Avada) and basic plugins (SEO, forms, security, cache) loads in 4-6 seconds on average.

Why? Because every time a visitor requests a page, WordPress has to:

• Execute PHP code on the server
• Query the MySQL database
• Load the theme with all its CSS and JavaScript
• Execute every installed plugin
• Generate the HTML page dynamically

All of this takes time. And Google, since 2021, uses loading speed as a direct ranking factor.

2. Security: 90,000 vulnerabilities per year

WordPress is the number 1 target for hackers on the internet. In 2025:

• Over 90,000 vulnerabilities were detected in plugins and themes
• 43% of website hacks were WordPress sites
• Every plugin is a potential entry point for an attacker
• Security updates must be applied weekly

If you don’t update, you’re vulnerable. If you do update, you risk breaking something. It’s an endless cycle.

3. Maintenance cost: the hidden trap

What nobody tells you when you choose WordPress is that the real cost isn’t the installation, it’s the maintenance:

• WordPress core updates: monthly
• Plugin updates: weekly
• PHP updates: annually
• Quality hosting: €20-50/month
• Premium security plugin: €10-30/month
• Premium cache plugin: €10-20/month
• Technician hours when something breaks: €50-100/hour

Annual WordPress maintenance cost: €1,500-4,000

Astro: the next generation of the web

Astro is a web creation framework born in 2021 that takes a radically different approach: it generates static HTML pages at build time, not at visit time.

How Astro works

When we build a website with Astro:

1. We write the components and content
2. Astro compiles everything into pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files
3. These files are uploaded to a global CDN (Vercel)
4. When a visitor requests a page, they receive the pre-generated HTML directly

There’s no server running code. No database to query. No plugins to load. The page is already built and just needs to be served.

The concrete advantages

Speed: <1 second load time

These aren’t theoretical numbers. They’re real measurements from production websites.

Security: far less attack surface

An Astro website deployed on Vercel:

• Has no database to hack
• Doesn’t run PHP code on the server
• Has no plugins with vulnerabilities
• Has no exposed admin panel (/wp-admin)
• Serves static files from CDN with HTTPS

No system is invulnerable, but the most heavily exploited WordPress attack vectors simply aren’t there. Security isn’t a feature you add. It’s a property of the architecture.

Maintenance: no recurring work

Since there’s no WordPress core, plugins, or PHP to update, technical maintenance reduces to:

• Updating Node.js dependencies (automatic with Dependabot)
• Deploying changes with git push (automatic with Vercel)
• That’s it

The result: the technical maintenance line that eats €1,500-4,000 a year on WordPress largely disappears.

The final comparison

But I need a CMS to edit content…

The most common concern is: “If I don’t have WordPress, how do I edit content?”

The answer: with a Git-based headless CMS such as Decap. A headless CMS is a content management system that:

• Offers a visual editing panel
• Stores content in the same repository as the site, with a full change history
• Is not exposed the way WordPress /wp-admin is
• Sends content to Astro, which generates the static pages

The result: you can edit the content yourself, but with Astro’s speed and security.

When we build a custom website, we settle this early: if your team wants to change text and images often, we set up the editing panel; if you’d rather we handle updates, we work directly with Markdown files, which is even faster and simpler.

When WordPress still makes sense

Let’s be fair: WordPress isn’t bad for everything. It can be the best choice if:

• You need WooCommerce for a complex online store with hundreds of products
• Your internal team already knows WordPress and doesn’t want to switch
• You need very specific plugins that don’t exist outside the WordPress ecosystem
• You have a blog with thousands of published articles and don’t want to migrate

For corporate websites, landing pages, service websites, restaurants, local businesses, and professionals, Astro comes out ahead: faster, more secure, cheaper to maintain, better for SEO.

Technology matters more than you think

Your website isn’t “just a website.” It’s your digital presence, the first impression you give to thousands of potential customers. The technology behind it determines:

• Whether Google ranks or penalizes you (speed)
• Whether visitors stay or leave (performance)
• Whether your business is vulnerable to attacks (security)
• How much you spend unnecessarily each year (maintenance)

At serpixel we build every custom website with Astro because we believe our clients deserve the best available technology, not the most popular one by inertia.

If you want to know what migrating your current site would actually involve (what can be reused, what has to be rebuilt, and whether it makes sense in your case), book a 30-minute session and we’ll go through your specific setup.