This is not a religious war. It's a tooling choice, and the right answer depends on what your business actually needs the website to do.
We build in both. Roughly a third of the small-business sites we ship run on WordPress (usually with WooCommerce when a CMS the team already knows matters more than raw speed), two-thirds run on Astro (usually when the site is a marketing / lead-gen asset and speed is a ranking signal worth fighting for). This is the honest framework for picking.
What WordPress is genuinely good at
- Ecosystem depth. 60,000+ plugins. If you need it, someone's already built it, membership gates, event booking, complex commerce, course platforms, directory listings.
- Familiar admin. The wp-admin dashboard is the most-used CMS interface in the world. New team members have probably used it before.
- Content-heavy editorial. A site that publishes 3+ articles per week with multiple authors, editorial workflow, scheduling. WordPress is built for this.
- WooCommerce for e-commerce. A mature, extensible stack for online stores when you need real commerce features (subscriptions, variable products, multi-currency checkout).
- Short-term cost. Themes are cheap (£30–£80), plugins mostly free, shared hosting £5/month.
What WordPress quietly costs you
The "cheap" part of WordPress usually stops being cheap by month 6:
- Plugin bloat. Every plugin adds JavaScript and CSS to every page. A typical "starter" WordPress site ships with 20–40 plugins. Performance suffers, page weight balloons, Core Web Vitals tank.
- Security surface. WordPress powers ~43% of the web, which makes it the biggest attacker target. Every plugin is a potential vulnerability. Monthly security scans, updates, backups are table stakes.
- Maintenance tax. Plugin conflicts, WordPress core updates, theme updates, something needs attention every week. Either you do it, or you pay someone £80–£450/month on a Care Plan.
- The page-builder trap. Elementor, Divi, WPBakery turn your clean HTML into DOM soup. Page weight doubles. Load speed halves. Editorial control improves on paper but the site gets slow enough to lose rankings.
What Astro does differently
Astro is a modern framework built on a simple premise: static HTML by default, JavaScript only where it's actually interactive.
- Tiny JS footprint. A typical Astro marketing site ships 5–15 KB of JavaScript to the browser vs WordPress's 500 KB+.
- Static by default. Pages pre-render at build time and serve from a CDN. Time to First Byte is milliseconds, not seconds.
- Islands architecture. Need a React component for one interactive section? Fine, only that island ships React. The rest stays static.
- Content comes from wherever makes sense. Markdown files, headless CMS, your API. Astro doesn't care. The build compiles everything into clean HTML.
- No plugin bloat. You add packages when you need them, not because a theme demands them.
Real-world performance gap
Numbers from our own builds (audited on mobile PageSpeed Insights):
- WordPress + common theme + 25 plugins: PageSpeed score 45–65
- WordPress + custom theme + minimal plugins: 65–80
- Astro + Keystatic + optimised images: 92–100
That 20–40 point gap translates to real-world behaviour:
- Google ranks faster sites higher for identical content
- ~53% of mobile users abandon sites that take over 3s to load
- Conversion rates drop 4–7% for every extra second of load time
For a business spending £1,000/month on paid ads, this is often the difference between ROAS of 2× and 4×.
Editorial UX for non-devs
The "WordPress wins because non-tech teams can edit it" argument was true in 2018. In 2026, modern headless CMSes (Keystatic, Sanity, Contentful) offer editor experiences that rival wp-admin, sometimes exceed it.
- Keystatic, git-backed, free, the admin lives inside your own site. Every edit is a commit → reviewable, revertible, no remote service to pay.
- Sanity, cloud-hosted, generous free tier, mature content-modelling. Real-time collaboration.
- Contentful, enterprise-grade, pricey above the free tier, best for multi-brand/multi-region content.
All three pair seamlessly with Astro. Your non-technical team gets a clean admin they can edit in; you get a site that loads in 800ms.
When WordPress is still the right call
- High-volume publishing. 3+ articles per week with 5+ authors, editorial workflow, scheduling.
- WooCommerce store with complex requirements, subscriptions, variable products, multi-currency, 1,000+ SKUs.
- Specific plugin dependency. Your business runs on a WordPress plugin that has no equivalent elsewhere (e.g. niche membership, legal workflow, directory).
- Team that knows wp-admin and nothing else. If your team actively resists learning any other tool, forcing a change costs more than it saves.
When Astro wins
- Marketing sites. Home, services, about, case studies, blog. 5–30 pages that need to load instantly and rank well.
- SEO-dependent businesses. Where organic traffic is the acquisition channel, the 20–40 PageSpeed point gap is existential.
- Low-edit-frequency sites. Teams that edit monthly, not weekly.
- Sites with specific interactive needs. Custom quote calculators, configurators, booking flows that don't fit a plugin.
- Budget-sensitive total cost of ownership. Static hosting is free-to-cheap; WordPress hosting + plugins + maintenance is £100+/month forever.
Cost over 3 years (realistic numbers)
WordPress route (Marketing-tier equivalent):
- Build: £6,500
- Hosting (managed WP host): £25/mo × 36 = £900
- Care Plan (updates, backups, security): £249/mo × 36 = £8,964
- Total: ~£16,400 over 3 years
Astro route (Marketing-tier equivalent):
- Build: £6,500
- Hosting (Cloudflare / Netlify / Vercel): free or £10/mo × 36 = £360
- Care Plan (lighter because no plugin tax): £149/mo × 36 = £5,364
- Total: ~£12,200 over 3 years
~£4,000 saving over 3 years, plus a site that's faster, ranks better and has a smaller attack surface.
Our default
For small-business marketing sites (the majority of what UK SMEs need in 2026), our default stack is Astro + Keystatic + Cloudflare hosting. It's the stack this very site runs on. Production build, real client workloads, 100+ Lighthouse on mobile, the stack keeps its promise.
For commerce-heavy clients or editorial operations that need wp-admin's depth, we build in WordPress properly, custom theme, minimal plugins, proper caching, no page-builder slop. The output is almost as fast as Astro. But the maintenance tax is permanent.
How to decide
Three questions:
- Does the site need to rank on Google for competitive terms? If yes, lean Astro.
- Will non-technical people edit weekly, with multiple editors? If yes, and they already know WordPress, lean WordPress.
- Is there a specific WordPress plugin your business depends on? If yes, WordPress. If no, the default should be Astro.
Most UK SMEs answer the first two in a way that points to Astro. Most think they need WordPress because that's what their last developer used.
Want to talk through which fits your business?
Book a free 30-minute strategy call. We'll look at your actual needs, edit frequency, traffic goals, integrations, and recommend honestly. No pitch, no pressure.
Or message on WhatsApp.