UK engineering-first migration partner
Digital Paper Agency Limited rebuilds your WordPress site on Astro and deploys it to the Cloudflare edge. You get sub-second TTFB, 100/100 Core Web Vitals and no PHP or plugin technical debt, with every legacy URL mapped so rankings hold.
Edge response sample
live-feelTTFB
edge cache hit
38 ms
Core Web Vitals
LCP · INP · CLS
100 / 100
Client JS
by default
0 kb
Illustrative figures for a typical statically built Astro page on Cloudflare. Your audit reports your real baseline.
Total cost of ownership
The case is commercial first: lower cost of ownership, a smaller security and compliance burden, and faster pages that convert better.
3–5x
shallower DOM on typical rebuilds
Page builders nest every heading inside layers of wrappers. Deep DOM trees, render-blocking CSS and JS, and slow MySQL queries all land on mobile LCP and INP. Astro renders plain HTML at build time and ships no JavaScript unless you ask for it.
0
public login pages or SQL endpoints
wp-admin, XML-RPC & SQL Injection VectorsMost WordPress incidents arrive through plugins. Remove the PHP runtime and the category of risk goes with it: no zero-day plugin panics, a shorter security questionnaire, and less cyber insurance and compliance overhead.
£300–£1,500
typical managed WP hosting per month
Managed WordPress hosting is priced around PHP and MySQL running on every uncached request. Cloudflare Pages and Workers serve pre-built assets from the edge, so the bill is a small fraction and stays flat through traffic spikes.
Technical gap #1
Each route picks the rendering mode that fits it, so you never trade speed for dynamic features. Switch between the three below.
HTML is generated once at build time and cached on the CDN. Requests are cache hits, and no client-side JavaScript ships unless a component asks for it. This is the default for service pages, landing pages, blog posts and documentation.
Compute happens once, before anyone visits.
// astro.config.mjs
export default defineConfig({
output: 'static', // every route pre-rendered
});prerender = false) for Dynamic Routes & Large Content HubsPast 5,000+ URLs, rebuilding everything on each edit stops making sense. Routes marked prerender = false render at the edge on request, which suits user authentication and real-time API data without waiting for a full site rebuild.
Rendered per request, close to the visitor.
// src/pages/account.astro
export const prerender = false;
const user = await getUser(Astro.cookies);client:visible / client:idle) & Server Islands (server:defer)Interactive calculators, search filters (Pagefind or Algolia) and personalised blocks hydrate on their own schedule, so none of them block the main thread. The static shell stays cached while islands load around it.
Only the interactive parts cost JavaScript.
<Search client:visible />
<Recommendations server:defer>
<Skeleton slot="fallback" />
</Recommendations>Editorial workflow
Leaving WordPress does not mean losing a good editing experience. We match the content model to how your team works.
Best for: Marketing teams
Visual previews, role-based access and structured component blocks, loaded through the Content Layer API into typed collections.
Best for: Docs, engineering blogs, lean B2B
Content lives in your repository and is checked by schema. No third-party CMS subscription.
Best for: Large editorial teams
For teams that will not leave Gutenberg. WordPress sits on a private origin behind Cloudflare Access and exposes content only through WPGraphQL.
Technical gap #2
The parts of a migration that usually get skipped, handled in code with schemas and tests.
Custom Node.js AST parsers strip Elementor and Divi wrapper markup. Strict data contracts in src/content.config.ts make bad content fail the build instead of reaching production.
astro:actions) & Edge API RoutesServer-side Zod validation, Cloudflare Turnstile anti-spam, CRM webhook retries (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce) and transactional email through Resend or Postmark.
/wp-content/uploads/ to Cloudflare R2 & astro:assetsAutomated AVIF and WebP optimisation and responsive srcset generation, with indexed image URLs preserved or redirected.
Automated canonicals, OpenGraph generation, dynamic XML sitemaps and component-level Schema.org injection, validated at build time.
Technical gap #3
Rankings survive a migration when every URL has a deliberate destination before launch.
Screaming Frog, Google Search Console exports and server logs combine to catch every indexed URL, orphan page and backlink target before building starts.
WordPress quirks handled on purpose: /%year%/%month%/ structures, /category/ bases, pagination (/page/2/) and attachment pages.
Edge redirects add no origin latency, handle 10,000+ rules without bloating _redirects, and strip tracking parameters.
Technical gap #4
Deployment mechanics that put your content close to every visitor and make a bad release a non-event.
@astrojs/cloudflare)Sub-50ms TTFB across UK and global points of presence, with Cloudflare D1, KV and Durable Objects where state is required.
Pressing Publish in the CMS triggers an instant staging preview and a zero-downtime production rollout through GitHub Actions or Cloudflare CI.
Strict Content Security Policy, HSTS and Permissions-Policy, plus instant atomic rollbacks.
Delivery roadmap
Crawl, log analysis, plugin inventory and a written architecture spec.
Extraction scripts load clean content into Zod-validated collections.
Your design rebuilt as lean Astro and Tailwind components.
Forms, search and integrations as Astro Actions and edge routes.
Every legacy URL tested against its redirect, vitals benchmarked before and after.
DNS cutover with no downtime, then 30 days of Search Console monitoring.
Side by side
Monolithic WordPress, Next.js and Astro across the five factors that decide a content-site rebuild.
| Criterion | Monolithic WordPress | Next.js | Astro |
|---|---|---|---|
| TTFB | Weak: Variable, depends on cache and PHP/MySQL | Mixed: Fast when static, slower when server-rendered | Strong: Edge cache hit |
| JS payload | Weak: Theme and plugin scripts on every page | Mixed: React runtime by default | Strong: Zero by default, islands opt in |
| Security surface | Weak: PHP, plugins, wp-admin, database | Mixed: Node runtime and dependencies | Strong: Static files, minimal edge code |
| Hosting cost | Weak: £300–£1,500/mo managed | Mixed: Usage-based platform pricing | Strong: Cloudflare edge economics |
| Build complexity | Strong: Low to start, high to maintain | Weak: High | Strong: Low to moderate |
Questions
Not when it is run properly. We map every indexed URL before building, preserve content and internal links, run 301 redirects at the edge and monitor Search Console for 30 days after launch. Faster pages tend to help, but no agency can guarantee a ranking outcome.
It depends on the plugin. WPML translations become Astro i18n routing, FacetWP-style filtering becomes a client island or an edge search index, and WooCommerce is usually replaced by a headless commerce platform or kept as a separate store. We scope each one in the Phase 1 audit.
Yes. A headless CMS such as Storyblok or Sanity lets editors assemble pages from approved component blocks with live preview. A Git-backed editor like Keystatic or TinaCMS suits smaller teams.
A site of around 100 pages is typically a matter of weeks. Larger sites with custom post types, multilingual content or complex redirects take longer. We give a firm timeline after the technical audit, not before.
Astro is built for content. It ships no JavaScript unless you ask, has first-class content collections and deploys cleanly to Cloudflare. Next.js is strong for highly interactive applications, but for marketing and editorial sites Astro gives faster pages with less to maintain.
Technical migration audit
Tell us about your current site. We reply with a URL inventory, a risk assessment and a fixed-scope migration proposal from Digital Paper Agency Limited.