WordPress To Static With AI?
I have small agency with around 100 WP sites we perform SEO & lead gen services for. We have been A/B testing internally by taking some sites and using Simply Static to generate a static version of our sites, then (using AI) migrating them over to Astro.js. For sites that need a CMS for things like blogs, etc, we are using a headless CMS (Strapi). Personally, I like this workflow for local business websites that don't constantly need page edits. We do SEO and posting new content is pretty straightforward with AI when in the hands of a engineer.
Our team is split on if we want to continue down this path.
From my observations:
pros:
- Less vulnerabilities
- Satisfying core web vitals without any need for layers of caching
- Able to use AI (I don't have any faith in any of the MCP servers claiming to work with WP page builders right now)
- Incredibly cheaper hosting (could run on a potato)
- Using a headless CMS (Like Strapi) is way less bloat than WP & also detached from the site so it won't effect it's performance
cons:
- Out of scope for your typical WP 'designer'. Our team needs knowledgable engineers regardless of if we're using AI because someone without knowledge of how Astro (Or any web framework for that matter) works will misprompt
- Difficulty with handoff if a client cancels with us and wants their website. They probably won't know what to do with a JS project.
- Not being able to use tooling we've spent thousands of dollars accumulating for WP over the years
Disclaimer that we are a professional agency and aren't looking to just 'AI everything'. I have a software engineering background and know how to properly utilize AI. I can design, build, and perform on-page SEO research & implementation without the help of AI (thankful I don't have to anymore though).
I have been scaling the company so that I can keep slowly taking myself out of doing grunt work and have been building a team to delegate to. This is where we're split. A lot of our team does not have the background and knowledge I have so I know that I can't just throw them into a completely foreign concept like this which is completely outside of their realm.
One idea we had was to just keep our overseas team handling 'legacy' where they will just be tasked with the current websites on WordPress while new sites will be build out on Astro (or any static site for that matter) w/ a headless CMS if needed. These new sites will be handled by the members of the team that can handle this (at the expense of charging double what the WP team charges).
Would love some outside opinions!