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WordPress to Astro in a day

  • astro
  • wordpress
  • upsun
  • ai

This morning, artetecha.com was a WordPress site. Not a small one, either: WordPress core managed through Composer, the Avada theme with its Fusion Builder companions vendored into the repo, a MariaDB database, a Redis object cache, an Elasticsearch cluster for search, and a Cloudflare page-cache plugin to tie the room together. Tonight it’s a folder of HTML files. This is the story of the day in between.

The diagnosis

The old site had been the shop window of my London consultancy, which I closed when I moved back to Italy. The site outlived the business by years, and its git history tells you exactly how it spent them: dependency bump, dependency bump, dependency bump. Dependabot was the only author still showing up to work.

That’s the WordPress treadmill in a nutshell. Nobody was writing content — the machinery existed purely to keep itself patched. For a company site with editors, WordPress earns its keep. For a personal professional site where the only author lives in his IDE anyway, a database is a liability you pay for monthly and apologise to quarterly.

The decision

Two decisions, really. First, what the site is: no longer an agency facade, but a personal practice under the old brand — Artetecha is now simply the tech practice of Vincenzo Russo. Second, what it runs on: Astro, content as Markdown in the repo, no CMS, no database, nothing to patch on a Tuesday night.

The requirements that survived scrutiny:

  • Bilingual from day one. English unprefixed, Italian under /it/, with honest hreflang pairs only where a real translation exists — no machine-generated duplicate-content fallbacks.
  • The palette comes from the logo. The same grey/lime/amber blobs and steel-blue script that have been on this domain since 2012, expanded into OKLCH token scales that drive both a light and a dark theme.
  • Zero JavaScript by default. The only script on the site is a vanilla theme toggle small enough to read in one breath. Page transitions and scroll reveals are CSS-only.
  • History survives. The best posts from 2009–2019 move into a clearly dated archive, and every old WordPress URL keeps resolving.

The migration

The content work was the part I expected to eat the day, and it didn’t, because I didn’t do it alone: I pair-worked the whole rebuild with an AI coding agent (Claude Code), which handled the drudgery while I made the calls. Ten archive posts were scraped from the live site and converted to Markdown — including recovering code samples from the <noscript> fallbacks of long-dead GitHub gist embeds, which felt like digital archaeology. Links that had rotted over fifteen years were repointed at the Wayback Machine. Four tech posts came over from my personal blog, which really has real reason to exist anymore.

The URL contract was the piece I cared most about. WordPress permalinks here looked like /slug/YYYY/MM/DD/, and the platform router now maps them with one regex:

'^/([a-z0-9-]+)/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/?$':
    to: "https://www.{default}/writing/archive/$1/"
    regexp: true

Posts that didn’t make the archive cut redirect to the archive index; /feed/ still serves RSS; the old section pages map to their successors. Every one of those redirects was verified against production before this post was written.

The subtraction

The most satisfying diff of the day was the platform config. The old .upsun/config.yaml declared three services and a deploy hook that flushed Redis and ran WP-CLI rituals. The new one declares no services at all: a Node build that runs astro build, and a web block that serves dist/ as static files with long-lived caching on hashed assets. Deployment is git push. Rollback is git revert. Staging is any branch.

Some numbers, for the record:

Before After
Backing services MariaDB, Redis, Elasticsearch none
Runtime PHP 8.4 + WordPress + 10 plugins static files
Client-side JS jQuery + Avada/Fusion bundles one theme toggle
Full build n/a (mutable state) ~0.5s for 28 pages
Content workflow wp-admin git push

The irony, acknowledged

Yes: I work at Upsun, this site runs on Upsun, and I spent years of my career deep in WordPress — the archive above is the evidence. I’ve even just released an open-source WordPress plugin that makes WordPress behave properly on this very platform. WordPress remains a fine tool where its model fits. It stopped fitting this site years ago, and the kindest thing you can do for a tool that no longer fits is to stop holding it.

Fourteen years of URLs intact, three services retired, one working day. The treadmill is off.