WordPress vs a static site: the rebuild I regretted

WordPress vs a static site: the rebuild I regretted

Month 1: Started a hiking-gear site on WordPress. Fast to launch, but by Month 5 I had 14 plugins and the homepage loaded in 3.8 seconds on mobile.

The turn: a Twitter thread convinced me static was the future. Month 6 I rebuilt 80 articles in Astro. Pages now hit 0.9s. I felt like a genius.

Then the cost showed up. Every content edit meant a git commit and a 4-minute build. My freelance writer, who'd happily used the WP editor, ground to a halt — she's a writer, not a developer. Publishing velocity dropped from 8 posts a month to 3.

Month 9: traffic was up 20% from speed, but output was down 60%. Net loss. I moved the writer-facing layer back to a headless WP that fed the static build. Best of both, twice the complexity.

The takeaway: static wins Core Web Vitals, but if a non-technical person touches your content daily, the friction tax eats the speed gain. Pick the stack your slowest contributor can actually use.