WordPress or Astro: The Scribe or the Printing Press

When you’re having a website built, you’ve usually been recommended something to build it with by a friend, or by someone you trust. Or sometimes you’ve just seen lots of adverts on the Tube. The name that comes up most is WordPress, and often it’s the right one, in part because it’s open and you end up owning what you’ve paid for. That’s why I build on open platforms rather than Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify.

It isn’t the only one, though, and there are alternatives that might suit you better. The one I reach for most is Astro, and most people haven’t heard of it.

So this is what’s different between the two, and why you might want Astro instead. It’s not a small difference. It decides how fast your site is, what it costs to run, and how easily you can change it later.

Printed once, or copied out for every reader

Think of your website as a book, and every visitor as someone who wants to read it.

There are two ways to get it to them.

One is a scribe. Every time someone asks for the book, the whole thing gets copied out by hand, first page to last, while the reader waits at the counter. Every copy is made to order. But you’re paying a scribe to sit there all day, and nobody reads a word until the copying is finished.

The other is to print it. You set the type once and do that job properly, with all the care and equipment it takes. After that, anyone can take a copy off the shelf and walk out with it the moment they ask. Same book, same words.

The printed copy isn’t the lesser one. It’s your book, all of it, set exactly how you wanted it, not a summary and not someone else’s book with your name on the cover. You’re not getting a template. All that changes is that the work was done once and kept, instead of repeated from scratch for every single reader.

Websites work these same two ways. You could say this is the difference between WordPress and Astro.

A WordPress site is the scribe. Every time someone visits a page, it writes that page out again from the top, and it needs the whole setup running the entire time to do it. The industry word for this is dynamic.

A site built with a tool like Astro is the printed book. Every page is made once, ahead of time, then handed straight over with almost nothing running behind it. The word for this is static.

That’s the whole idea. Everything else follows from it.

You can see the difference in how many steps each one goes through when someone opens a page:

flowchart LR
    subgraph DYN["WordPress: built on every visit"]
        direction TB
        A[/"Visitor opens the page"/] --> B["The site starts building it"]
        B --> C["Finds your content"]
        C --> DB[("Your content")]
        DB --> E["Puts the whole page together"]
        E --> F[\"Sends the finished page"\]
    end
    subgraph STAT["Astro: built ahead of time"]
        direction TB
        G["Pages built in advance"] -.-> I[\"Sends the ready-made page"\]
        H[/"Visitor opens the page"/] --> I
    end

    classDef io fill:#0b3b2e,stroke:#34d399,stroke-width:1.5px,color:#d1fae5;
    classDef process fill:#172334,stroke:#3f4a5f,color:#e2e8f0;
    classDef store fill:#1e2a4a,stroke:#818cf8,color:#e0e7ff;
    classDef prebuilt fill:#0f2019,stroke:#34d399,stroke-dasharray:4 3,color:#a7f3d0;

    class A,H,F,I io;
    class B,C,E process;
    class DB store;
    class G prebuilt;

What that means for you

Because a static site is already built, it loads faster. There’s nothing to put together, the page is simply there. A well-built static site is about as quick as a website gets.

It’s also cheaper to run and safer. A WordPress site needs a fair amount of machinery running behind it all the time to do that build-on-every-visit work, and that machinery has to be kept updated and protected, and the upkeep never stops. A static site has almost none of that. Hosting can cost a few pounds a month, and there’s very little that can break or be broken into.

The trade-off is that sometimes you really do want the scribe. More on that in a moment.

Same look, different delivery

Worth being clear about one thing: this is a choice about how the site is built, not how it looks. The same design works either way, so your visitors get the same pages and the same look.

What they do notice is speed, because the static one arrives faster. Behind the scenes the two are quite different, even when the end result on the screen is the same.

So why not always static?

This is where the printing analogy gets a bit thin, so let me be straight about it.

Plenty of websites have parts that need to actually do something: take a payment, sell a ticket, handle a contact form, show a live calendar. Those bits need a little machinery behind them, and a printed book can’t do that on its own.

Most of the time, though, you don’t build that machinery yourself. You use a trusted service that specialises in it, something like Stripe for payments or a dedicated ticketing platform, and it slots neatly into a static site. Better still, it handles the sensitive parts, card details and personal information, so that data stays off your own site and out of your hands. A fast static site can still sell, take bookings, and handle enquiries perfectly well.

Where a static site starts to strain is when the whole experience is personal. If people log into an account and every page changes depending on who they are, their orders, their preferences, their own data, then every reader really does need a different book, and that’s genuine scribe territory. A membership site or a full online shop is the usual example: alongside the ordinary marketing pages, there’s a personalised layer that has to respond to each customer. That’s where a dynamic platform like WordPress is the right tool.

Even then, WordPress isn’t automatically the right answer for the most app-like projects. That’s a call to make job by job, and one I’m happy to make with you rather than defaulting to a favourite.

Can I still update the website myself?

This is the question I get asked most, so here’s the straight answer: yes, either way.

With WordPress you log in and edit through a built-in editor, and different people can be given different levels of access. If you want a full drag-and-drop experience, where you change the page and see the result exactly as it will look, there are page builders like Elementor for that too. You can update your content and add new pages yourself.

A site built with Astro doesn’t come with a visual editor of its own. Left as it is, you’d edit the page’s text files directly. They’re written in markdown, which is just plain text with a few simple formatting symbols, and it’s friendlier than it sounds, but it’s still not something most business owners want to be doing. So we pair the site with a content management system: a place to log in and edit your content by filling in fields, much like filling in a form. It doesn’t give you the exact live preview a WordPress page builder does, and there’s a small learning curve to see which field controls what, but if you can fill in a form, you can update your site.

For the everyday updates, a bit of text, a price, a photo, a new event, both are easy once it’s set up. The one thing that always takes a little skill is a brand new page with a new layout, whichever way the site is built, and that’s normally a quick job for me rather than something you’d want to wrestle with yourself.

There’s also a newer way I’m increasingly using, where you update the site just by asking a custom AI assistant, in your own words, with no fields to fill in at all. It works especially well with this kind of setup. I’ve written about how it works in update your website by just asking an AI.

Which one is right for you?

Roughly:

• A static site suits most small business sites: brochure sites, hotels, restaurants, portfolios, anything that’s mainly there to inform, where speed and low running costs matter and updates are occasional.
• WordPress suits sites with more going on behind the scenes: shops with complex needs, membership or account areas, or a big team editing every day.

Plenty of sites sit in between, where you get the speed of a static site with an easy way to edit it. That’s often the best of both.

The right answer depends on what your site actually needs to do. I pick the one that fits, and either way you own the site outright, with no platform holding the keys.