If you run an agency you have shipped WordPress sites by the dozen. Clients recognize it, there is a plugin for everything, and a junior can install it in an afternoon.
You have also been on the other end: the Saturday “my site is showing a pharmacy ad” call, the plugin update that broke checkout, the client who asks every quarter why the homepage takes four seconds on a phone. Astro is the static site generator that a growing number of agencies are moving new builds to. This is a straight comparison for agency work, including the cases where WordPress still wins.
Speed
WordPress assembles every page in PHP from a database on each request. Caching plugins paper over that, and the good ones help, but you are optimizing against the architecture rather than with it. Themes and page builders then stack their own scripts and stylesheets on top.
Astro renders the whole site to HTML files at build time and ships no JavaScript unless a component explicitly asks for it. The page a visitor receives is a document, not a program. Every Amrify template has to score 100 in all four Lighthouse categories on a CI gate before it can ship, and that is achievable because there is so little on the page to slow down.
The commercial side of this is easy to underestimate. Core Web Vitals feed rankings, and a slow phone experience quietly leaks leads. If you want a figure to put in a proposal, the free slow website cost calculator turns a load time and a traffic number into a dollar estimate.
Security
WordPress runs a large share of the web, which makes it the most profitable target there is. Every plugin is a new attack surface, and the maintenance burden lands on the agency: core patches, plugin patches, a security plugin to watch the other plugins, and a firewall rule for good measure.
A static Astro site has no database to inject into, no login page to brute-force and no PHP to exploit. Deployment is copying files to a CDN. What is left to attack is the hosting account itself, which is a much shorter list of things to secure.
That removes a whole category of agency work: the emergency clean-up you cannot bill for at full rate.
The Monthly Maintenance Load
This table is about what you have to keep doing, because that is where agency margin goes:
| Task | WordPress | Astro (static) |
|---|---|---|
| Runtime updates | Core, PHP version, plugins, theme | None; there is no runtime |
| Backups | Database plus uploads, on a schedule | The git repository is the backup |
| Security patching | Ongoing | Not applicable to static files |
| Hosting | A managed PHP host | Free tiers on Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare Pages cover most business sites |
| Speed work | Caching, image plugins, script deferral | Built in at build time |
Care plans exist because WordPress needs care. With a static site the “care” is a rebuild when content changes.
Content Editing
Here WordPress still has the better story for a client who wants to edit copy on their own at 10pm. The block editor is visual and familiar.
Astro’s native content is Markdown with frontmatter validated by a schema. For agencies that run the content pipeline themselves this is faster, because a text file in git is quicker to review and impossible to break silently: a missing field fails the build instead of rendering a blank hero. If the client must edit directly, put a git-backed CMS such as Decap or Tina, or a hosted one such as Sanity, in front of the same files.
Running Many Sites
WordPress Multisite exists and most agencies avoid it: a shared plugin update ripples through every site in the network, and one bad update takes them all down. So the usual answer is separate installs, which means fixing the same thing separately on each.
Astro fits a monorepo. Shared layouts, components and schemas live in packages; each client site is a folder of config and content that imports them. A fix in a shared layout reaches every site on its next build, while each site still deploys on its own. This is how one codebase runs a whole fleet of live sites on the Amrify system.
When to Stay on WordPress
- The client edits content daily and will not accept a CMS layer in front of Markdown
- The site depends on a specific plugin ecosystem: WooCommerce, an LMS, membership plugins
- Your team writes PHP and not TypeScript, and retraining is not on the table this year
When Astro Is the Better Call
- Rankings and Core Web Vitals are part of what the client is paying for
- You are tired of billing for updates that add nothing the client can see
- You want to grow past ten sites without the maintenance growing with them
- Your agency controls the content pipeline
Making the Move Without a Big Bang
Nobody migrates a portfolio in a weekend. Start the next new client on Astro and leave the WordPress sites alone until their next redesign. The free Amrify Starter (public repo at launch) is a complete business site that already clears the Lighthouse gate, so a first Astro project does not begin with a blank folder. For agencies with a fleet, Amrify Pro adds the multi-site scaffolder, ten trade templates and the lead engine, and includes every future niche template at no extra cost.
The honest summary: WordPress trades a long maintenance tail for a familiar editing screen. Astro trades a learning curve for sites that stay fast and stay put. The more sites you run, the more the second trade pays.
When a site is ready to move, the step-by-step WordPress to Astro guide covers exports, redirects and the SEO work that protects rankings.
Put a number on the WordPress site you are about to pitch a rebuild for. Run it through the free slow website cost calculator for the monthly cost of its load time, then through You vs. The Competition next to the two competitors that outrank it. Both are free and need no account. Bring the results to the client meeting; the Astro proposal writes itself.
