Should I migrate my WordPress site to Astro?

The case for migrating

For content-led websites — marketing sites, agencies, professional services, B2B SaaS landing sites, blogs — Astro is currently the strongest framework on the market. Where WordPress sends a database query for every page request and hydrates a heavy theme on every load, Astro pre-renders static HTML at build time and ships zero JavaScript by default.

The practical results are dramatic:

• Lighthouse Performance scores: typically 100 on Astro, often 40–60 on a comparable WordPress site
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): under 1 second on Astro, often 3–5 seconds on WordPress
• Page weight: under 500KB on Astro, often 3–5MB on WordPress
• Hosting cost: $0–20/month on Vercel for Astro, $20–200/month for managed WordPress
• Maintenance: near-zero on Astro (no plugin updates, no security patches), monthly on WordPress

For sites where speed and AEO matter — which is now most sites — those numbers move real business outcomes.

When migration makes sense

Migration is the right call if:

• Your site loads in over 2.5 seconds on mobile
• Your hosting + maintenance costs over £100/month
• Your content rarely changes (sub-weekly is the threshold)
• You’re already paying for plugins that should be free or framework-native (page builders, caching, image optimisation, SEO)
• You haven’t been cited by AI search engines despite trying
• Your editors are technical or willing to use a markdown editor (or you’re happy to add a CMS layer like Sanity)

When it doesn’t

Migration is the wrong call if:

• Your site relies heavily on a complex WordPress plugin ecosystem (LMS, membership, complex booking, advanced ecommerce). These are technically migratable but the cost-benefit usually doesn’t work
• You publish multiple posts per day and need a non-technical CMS workflow without adding a Sanity-style layer
• Your site is large WooCommerce. Better to put Astro in front of Shopify than to migrate WooCommerce wholesale
• You don’t care about performance, AEO, or maintenance cost. WordPress works. If those things don’t matter to you, you don’t need to migrate

What changes for content editors

The biggest change is the editing surface. WordPress gives non-technical editors a rich admin UI with previews. Astro by default uses markdown files in a git repository — fine for technical editors, intimidating for non-technical ones.

Two solutions:

1. Pair Astro with a headless CMS. Sanity is our default recommendation. It gives editors a clean visual interface with previews, supports collaboration, handles images well, and integrates with Astro through @sanity/astro. The editor experience is dramatically better than WordPress while keeping Astro’s performance advantages.
2. Use a markdown editor. Tools like Obsidian, Notion (via export), or even VSCode work well for technical or quasi-technical editors. Combined with a deploy-on-commit workflow, the experience is fast and frictionless — once you’re past the learning curve.

For most small businesses, the answer is: ship as markdown if there’s one editor, add Sanity if there are multiple non-technical editors.

What a typical migration looks like

For an 8–15 page small business marketing site (most clients):

1. Week 1 — Audit and plan. Map every URL, document every plugin, identify replacement strategies, write a content migration plan.
2. Week 2 — Build the new design and structure. Tailwind-based design system, Astro content collections, schema baked in, llms.txt published.
3. Week 3 — Migrate content. WXR export from WordPress, parse to markdown, optimise images, validate every internal link.
4. Week 4 — UAT and launch. Staging review, 301 redirects mapped, sitemap submitted to Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster, monitoring set up.

Larger sites (50+ pages, multiple content types, ecommerce) take 6–10 weeks. Blogs with thousands of posts can run longer but Astro handles them at build time without issue.

What you keep

You keep:

• Your domain
• Your URLs (with 301s where structure genuinely changed)
• Your content
• Your inbound links and rankings (they almost always improve)
• Your existing email and any non-website services
• Your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster setup
• Your analytics (or upgrade to Plausible/Fathom for privacy)

What you give up

You give up:

• The WordPress admin UI (replaced with markdown or Sanity)
• The plugin ecosystem (replaced with native or platform alternatives)
• The maintenance treadmill of plugin updates and security patches
• Slow performance and the SEO drag that comes with it

For most content-led sites, that’s a trade worth making.