The Twenty Percent Where WordPress Still Wins

There’s a particular kind of article that fills the first page of Google when you search “Astro vs WordPress” or “should I leave WordPress.” It’s written by someone selling one of the two platforms. The Astro evangelist explains why WordPress is bloated, old, and dangerous. The WordPress agency explains why static sites are limited, developer-only, and inflexible. Both are right in places and both are useless overall, because what they’re really doing is recommending the thing they sell.

I sell Astro builds. So by the rules of the genre, I’m exactly the wrong person to ask.

Except I built on WordPress for twelve years before I switched, and I still recommend WordPress for about one in five small business owners who come to me wanting a quote to leave it. The rest of this is how I tell the difference.

The Eighty Percent

For most of what UK small businesses actually do on the web — service pages, portfolios, brochure sites, B2B suppliers, tradespeople, consultancies, small product catalogues — Astro is the better fit, and the gap isn’t subtle.

The page loads in under a second instead of three to five. There’s no admin panel to brute-force, no plugins to keep updated, no monthly subscription stack with annual renewals you forgot you signed up for. The maintenance time on a WordPress build that’s being looked after properly runs to twenty-five or forty hours a year — updates that conflict, security patches that need verifying, the occasional plugin author who’s abandoned the codebase and forced a hunt for a replacement. Most small business owners aren’t logging those hours, which is why the time cost stays invisible. I ran the numbers on my own pre-Astro setup and that’s where the figure came from. It surprised me.

The hosting bill drops too. A typical managed WordPress host runs £25-40 a month. An Astro site on Netlify’s free tier runs nothing for the traffic levels most small businesses see. Over five years the total cost of ownership for WordPress comes out at £1,500-£3,500 once you include plugin renewals, theme licences, and the developer time the hosting page doesn’t mention. The equivalent Astro setup is a one-off build cost and essentially nothing after that.

The Twenty Percent

There are real cases where WordPress is still the right answer, and I’ll name them straight because anyone telling you Astro is always the right call hasn’t worked enough WordPress builds.

WordPress wins when the site has a real member area — user accounts, profile pages, gated content, course delivery. It wins when there’s a forum or a community with user-generated content. It wins when you genuinely self-edit the site daily and refuse to involve a developer for any change. It wins when you depend on a specific WordPress plugin that has no equivalent elsewhere, which happens more often than the Astro crowd admits.

None of these are common across the UK small business web. But when they apply, they’re decisive. The wrong call costs more than the right call saved.

The Editing Question, Honestly

This is the part of the comparison most platform-loyalty articles dodge.

WordPress has a visual editor in the browser. You click a paragraph, you type, you hit save, the change is live. For non-technical small business owners who want to update their site once a week, this is a real benefit, and it’s how WordPress kept market share against everything that came after.

Astro doesn’t have that, by default. Content lives in Markdown files inside a code repository. Updates happen by editing a file and pushing the change, which is what developers do. Most of my clients don’t want to do that — they email me the change, I make it, the site rebuilds and deploys in two minutes. The pay-monthly route at £49 a month bundles those content updates into the package, which is the answer for owners who’d rather email a developer than fight with a CMS.

If self-editing genuinely matters to you — daily updates, time-sensitive content, the kind of site where waiting twenty-four hours for a developer would be a problem — WordPress wins on this axis. For most small business owners I work with, the honest answer is that they’d rather have a site that doesn’t break and someone who picks up the phone when they need a change made.

The Wider Pattern

I’ve been writing about the invisible layers of small business websites all year. A canonical tag pointing at a domain that didn’t exist. A merchant feed silently broken across a platform migration. A title getting truncated before anyone clicked it. A Highland & Islands shipping rate that sat at checkout and never got picked. The platform underneath the site is the deepest of those layers — it shapes which of these problems you have and how often you have them.

A WordPress site has a plugin layer that needs constant attention and a database that can be slow, hacked, or out of date. An Astro site has none of that and brings a different trade-off — there’s no point-and-click editor, and the maintenance model assumes someone technical is on the other end of an email. Neither platform is better in the abstract. Both are answers to specific questions, and the right one for your site depends on which questions matter most.

The genre of comparison article I opened with pretends those trade-offs don’t exist. They do. Once you can see them, the question stops being “which platform should I be on” and starts being “what does my site actually have to do.”

What to Do With This

If you’re on WordPress and the site is working — pages load reasonably fast, the maintenance isn’t a drain, the editing experience matches how you actually update it — there’s no urgent reason to move. Astro is faster and cheaper to run, but a working WordPress site doesn’t cost you anything new this month. Migrations have a cost and a risk and they should pay for themselves.

If you’re on WordPress and the site is slow, the renewals are stacking up, the maintenance keeps eating evenings, and you don’t self-edit anyway, the move is worth doing. The detail of how that move protects your SEO and your traffic is in the WordPress to Astro migration page.

If you’re not sure which side of the line your business sits on, send me the URL of your current site and I’ll tell you straight. Sometimes the answer is “stay where you are” — it’s more interesting when it isn’t.

The full comparison piece, with the cost numbers, the security argument, the SEO trade-offs, and the editing question worked through in detail, is here: Astro vs WordPress for Small Business: An Honest Comparison.

Tony Cooper We Build Stores

tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk 07963 242210

P.S. If you’d like the three-question test run on your specific site — including the five-year cost picture for whatever you’re currently running — reply to this email with the URL and I’ll send you the answer. No charge for the assessment, no obligation. The point of the exercise is that the right answer is sometimes “stay where you are,” and you should have that confirmed by someone who isn’t selling you the alternative.