WordPress Alternatives: Why I Moved KMT to Astro

WordPress Alternatives: Why I Moved KMT to Astro

If you could move your marketing site to a website that was 400-500% faster, required no CDN, significantly reduced its vulnerabilities to hacking, and could be easily used by AI, would you?

A few weeks ago I moved keystonemartech.com away from WordPress for the first time in a long time, into the Astro web framework.

The driving force was that I was tired of struggling with the WordPress block editor and themes. I would have an idea for a page, but by the time I finally got it close to “good enough” I really didn’t care anymore because it took so long.

The other reason is that, as I continue to figure out how to use AI tools in my various work processes, working with WordPress was becoming a blocker. There is, to my knowledge, no easy way to work with WordPress and AI (not content, but the page structure and design).

Enter Astro

Full disclosure: Claude introduced me to Astro after my rant about WordPress. Something about bringing a bazooka to a knife-fight.

Astro feels old school. It is very familiar. The files that make up an Astro website are largely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript sitting in folders on your computer. It compiles everything into plain HTML and CSS with only the barest amount of JavaScript needed to run elements on your pages.

This makes an Astro site extremely fast. My page load time went from around 3.5 seconds with WordPress to nearly instantaneous. It also eliminated my need for a CDN, because a CDN simply caches your plain old HTML and CSS files, but that’s what my server is providing right out of the gate.

It also increased site security because Astro is file-based, not database-based. There’s no database to get hacked or exposed. There’s not a bunch of plugins of various quality that each increase security vulnerabilities. We’ve had more than one site taken down in the past because of plugin vulnerabilities. That alone was reason enough to move.

Astro itself is open source and free. No paid tier, no enterprise license, no feature gates, noth’n. Moving to it also killed about $500 a year in plugin subscriptions I was carrying just to prop WordPress up.

Astro Is Not for Everybody

I should mention that Astro is going to work great for sites that are primarily marketing websites. It’s not going to work if you’re making a stock trading app. Also, it is not a CMS. There’s no frontend for you to edit your content in. You would either edit your content through AI the way I’m about to describe, or sometimes you might go into a file directly and just change it.

For some people this will be a dealbreaker, and I get it. But keep reading.

Where It Really Gets Cool

Remember when I was talking about AI and WordPress above? AI can run through Astro like a hot knife through butter.

Level One: It’s Just a Conversation

I talk to Claude about what I want. Claude makes the changes on the local site. We check them, then we commit them, and they get published to the live site. Takes moments.

Level Two: The Singularity

The KMT Stack is based on open source platforms for web analytics, marketing automation, CRM, and workflow integrations that are all accessible via MCP servers. Add Astro into the mix and you get this:

1. Eric and Claude talk about a possible campaign, audience types, calls to action, and so on until agreement (10 minutes).
2. Claude takes a few minutes and thinks about a landing page, what kind of form is needed, what kind of segments are needed in our marketing automation tool, what kind of drip campaign we should have, how many emails should be created, and then the actual emails themselves. Eric agrees (5-8 minutes).
3. Claude builds the page in Astro, builds a form in Mautic, embeds the form in Astro, creates a segment in Mautic to hold submissions, creates three (or so) emails in Mautic, builds a drip campaign in Mautic for those emails, with X amount of days between emails (10 minutes).
4. Eric looks through everything, can’t believe it, looks through it again, and then sits back in amazement.

What used to take weeks just took under 30 minutes. Wha?????

If you’re tired of wrestling with WordPress, or you want your site to move at the speed AI is making possible, Astro is worth a serious look. And if you’re stuck figuring out what your website and MarTech stack should look like next, that’s the kind of conversation we have at KMT. Get in touch and we’ll figure out what fits.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What are the best WordPress alternatives for a small marketing website? A: If your site is primarily a brochure site with a blog, a static framework like Astro is a strong fit. It’s fast, secure, free, and works exceptionally well with AI-assisted editing and build workflows.

Q: Do I need to know how to code to use Astro? A: Not necessarily. AI tools like Claude can handle the builds and edits conversationally. You describe what you want, review what you get, and iterate. That said, there’s no visual CMS editor, so it’s a different way of working than WordPress.

Q: How does AI work with the KMT Stack and Astro together? A: The KMT Stack tools (Mautic, Matomo, n8n, Twenty CRM) are all accessible via APIs and MCP servers. Combined with Astro, AI can build a complete campaign (landing page, forms, emails, segments, drip sequences) in under 30 minutes, end to end.