I’ve worked with WordPress for years. I’ve used it professionally, managed websites built on it, and relied on its ecosystem of themes and plugins. My own site, namphan.com, spent nearly a decade on WordPress and GoDaddy hosting.
So when I decided it was time for a refresh, WordPress should have been the obvious choice. Except this time, I wanted to try something different.
The little things add up
My frustration with WordPress wasn’t about one catastrophic problem. It was a collection of smaller things that became harder to justify: performance, hosting costs, the price of another theme, and the work involved in moving from one theme to another.
If you’ve ever purchased a WordPress theme based on its demo, you probably know the experience. The demo looks fantastic. Then you install it and discover that recreating what you saw requires a particular set of plugins, settings, and dependencies. Something doesn’t behave quite the same way, and suddenly a redesign becomes a troubleshooting exercise.
None of this makes WordPress a bad platform. But for a personal website that mostly needed to showcase photography, explain my marketing work, and give people a way to contact me, I started questioning how much complexity I really needed.
Seeing what else was possible
Part of my curiosity came from watching others move away from WordPress. At my day job, I’d seen a different approach produce noticeable improvements in Lighthouse performance metrics. That got my attention.
I was also building OpenLLMWorks, a project for benchmarking local AI hardware. Working on that site introduced me to a different workflow: make changes in code, keep track of them in GitHub, and deploy them without the usual theme-and-plugin routine.
What impressed me most was the speed of deployment. Making a change and seeing it go live felt remarkably straightforward. After that experience, I started wondering why I wasn’t taking the same approach with my personal site.
A smaller stack, more control
For the rebuild, I chose Astro and Cloudflare Pages, with GitHub handling version control. Because the site is primarily static, I no longer needed a WordPress installation running behind it. No PHP application to maintain and no collection of plugins determining what I could or couldn’t build.
That smaller footprint appealed to me for more than speed. Fewer moving parts can mean fewer dependencies to update and fewer opportunities for things to break. It doesn’t make a website automatically secure or maintenance-free, but it does change what I have to look after.
I also liked the idea of starting with a lightweight foundation rather than trying to recover performance after the fact. In October 2026, the rebuilt homepage scored 99 for mobile performance and 100 for accessibility, best practices, and SEO in Lighthouse. Photography and Marketing also performed well. Those are snapshots from lab tests, not guarantees about every visitor’s experience, but they were encouraging.
The benefits went beyond performance
I’d been paying roughly $15 a month for GoDaddy hosting. That’s $180 a year. Hardly life-changing money, but money I’d rather keep if I don’t need to spend it. At that same rate, ten more years would add up to $1,800. The move to Cloudflare Pages eliminated that hosting bill for my current setup.
Cloudflare also handles HTTPS certificates for the site. And I finally had a deployment process I could see and understand, rather than a hosting dashboard I visited only when something needed attention.
The contact form was a good example. Instead of adding another WordPress plugin, I put together a form using Cloudflare Pages Functions, Turnstile for spam protection, and Resend for email delivery. It sends real messages, and I have a much clearer picture of how the pieces work together.
Maybe the most useful unexpected benefit was learning more about GitHub and Cloudflare along the way. Feature branches, preview deployments, and production releases stopped being abstract development terms. They became part of how I maintain my own website.
The fun part was building it
Once the foundation was in place, I could focus on the details that make the site feel like mine: typography, spacing, a photography gallery, and subtle animations using Motion. With AI assistance, implementing those features felt much more approachable than I’d expected.
There was still troubleshooting. Plenty of it. But the experience was different from searching through plugins and hoping one happened to do what I wanted. I could start with the result I had in mind and work toward it, rather than shaping the site around a theme’s limitations.
That was probably the biggest change for me. I wasn’t just managing a website anymore. I was learning how the thing was put together.
Two very different animals
One thing I want to make clear is that WordPress and Astro are two vastly different animals that can produce websites that look remarkably similar. WordPress is a content management system. Astro is a web framework. That distinction matters more than I initially appreciated.
WordPress comes with a familiar backend interface. If you’ve spent time using productivity software, navigating its dashboard isn’t particularly intimidating. You can create pages, upload images, publish articles, and make changes without necessarily touching a line of code.
Astro is a different experience entirely. The best way I can describe it is that Astro feels like leveling up HTML and CSS after gaining a ridiculous amount of XP from an hour-long raid. You’re suddenly equipped to do more, but that doesn’t mean you’ve mastered all the skills needed to use your new abilities.
For what I needed, I was only using a fraction of WordPress’s capabilities. I had an entire content management system running behind a relatively straightforward personal website. It worked, but I was carrying around functionality I rarely touched.
Astro felt like a much better fit. I could build what I wanted without starting with an entire CMS. But that freedom comes with trade-offs.
Want a working contact form? I needed to connect Cloudflare Pages Functions with Resend for email delivery and Turnstile for spam protection. Want the animations and interactions I envisioned? I brought in Motion.dev. These weren’t impossible tasks, but they weren’t features I could simply enable from a dashboard, either.
And here’s the part I’m still figuring out: I don’t yet know how to maintain every aspect of this website independently. If I want to publish another Sticky Notes article or upload and display additional photography, I’m still relying on AI to help me work through the process. I understand more about how the pieces fit together than I did when I started, but I’m not going to pretend I’ve suddenly become a seasoned frontend developer.
WordPress gave me a familiar interface for managing a website. Astro gives me greater control over how that website is built, but it also asks me to understand more of what’s happening underneath. Neither approach is inherently better. They’re simply designed for different needs.
In some ways, Astro reminds me of Linux. It’s lightweight, fast, and powerful, but not exactly turnkey, even once it’s up and running. For someone who needs to log in every morning, upload a few images, edit a page, and publish an article without opening a code editor, WordPress might still be the better choice. It’s proven itself across blogs, e-commerce stores, and all kinds of business websites.
For my personal site, though, Astro feels like a near-perfect fit.
Would I do it again?
For namphan.com? Absolutely. I have a leaner site, a hosting bill that’s $15 a month lighter, and a workflow that gives me more freedom to experiment. I’ve also picked up practical experience with tools I previously knew more from the sidelines.
But the real takeaway isn’t that everyone should switch to Astro. I traded a familiar editing interface for a leaner site and more control, along with a responsibility to keep learning. AI helps me bridge the gaps for now, and that’s part of the experience, too. A tool can serve you well for nearly ten years and still stop being the best fit for what you’re doing now.
Sometimes it’s worth trying something different. Not because the old way is wrong, but because you might discover a better way for you.