Astro vs WordPress for marketing sites: speed, SEO, and cost
For a content-driven marketing site, Astro ships less JavaScript, passes Core Web Vitals more easily, and costs less to run than WordPress. Here is the decision framework — and the data behind it.
For a content-driven marketing site, Astro is the better default: it ships near-zero JavaScript by default, passes Core Web Vitals more easily, and removes the plugin-and-patch treadmill that makes WordPress expensive to keep secure. WordPress still wins when you need a sprawling plugin ecosystem, a membership store, or non-technical editors who refuse anything new — but for a brochure, services, and blog site whose job is to load fast and rank, Astro is the lower-risk, lower-cost choice. This post lays out the trade-offs with current data so you can decide for your own situation.
The short answer, by job-to-be-done
Pick the tool for the work the site actually does:
- Marketing / brochure / services / blog → Astro. The content is mostly read-only, the priority is speed and SEO, and there’s no reason to pay the runtime cost of a database and a PHP render on every request.
- App-like features (logins, carts, member areas) → WordPress (or a real app framework). This is where its plugin ecosystem earns its keep.
Most sites that call themselves “marketing sites” fall squarely in the first bucket. The rest of this post is why.
Speed: less JavaScript, by architecture
The core architectural difference is what gets sent to the browser. Astro uses an islands model — pages render to static HTML at build time and ship zero JavaScript by default, hydrating only the specific interactive components you mark. A typical WordPress page loads a theme stylesheet, jQuery, and the scripts from every active plugin, whether the page uses them or not.
That matters because JavaScript is the most expensive thing on a page: the browser has to download, parse, and execute it before the page is interactive. The HTTP Archive 2025 Web Almanac notes that performance “remains one of the strongest correlating factors with search visibility,” and that sites minimizing JavaScript payload consistently outperform heavier, client-rendered experiences. Astro’s default output sits at the light end of that distribution by design; a plugin-laden WordPress install sits at the heavy end without deliberate effort.
Illustrative comparison of a typical Astro marketing page vs. a typical plugin-equipped WordPress page. Exact figures vary by build. JS-payload context: HTTP Archive 2025 Web Almanac, Page Weight.
SEO: Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal — and a conversion lever
Google has confirmed that page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, are a ranking factor, and uses them as a tie-breaker between pages with otherwise similar content quality (Google Search Central). The bar is not trivial: only 42% of mobile sites pass all three Core Web Vitals, and mobile is where most traffic and most of the revenue impact sit.
Speed isn’t just a ranking input — it’s a conversion lever. Research summarized in Core Web Vitals 2025 revenue studies found that roughly every 100ms of load time costs about 1% in conversions, and that product pages with a 2-second LCP convert 40–50% better than those at 4–5 seconds. A static Astro site starts from a structural advantage on exactly the metrics Google rewards.
Security and maintenance: the surface you don’t have to defend
This is where WordPress’s strength becomes its liability. Its plugin ecosystem is enormous, and so is its attack surface. Patchstack’s 2025 mid-year report found that 91% of newly discovered WordPress vulnerabilities were in plugins, with themes making up most of the rest. Worse, Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security data reports that more than half of plugin developers notified of a vulnerability did not patch it before public disclosure.
A static Astro site has no PHP runtime, no database to inject into, and no plugin auto-update treadmill. There’s nothing executing on the server to exploit — the CDN serves files. That eliminates an entire category of recurring maintenance work and emergency patching that WordPress owners budget for every month.
Cost: total cost of ownership, not just the sticker
WordPress is “free,” but a production marketing install rarely is. The real line items are managed hosting tuned for PHP/MySQL, premium plugin and theme licenses, a security/backup service, and the labor to keep all of it patched. A static Astro site deploys to a CDN’s free or near-free tier, has no server to scale, and shifts cost from recurring maintenance to a one-time build.
The honest caveat: Astro asks for more up-front engineering, and content editing requires a CMS layer (we pair Astro with Sanity so non-technical teams can edit without a developer). You trade ongoing operational drag for a higher initial build investment — usually a good trade for a site you intend to keep for years.
So when should you keep WordPress?
Astro is not always the answer. Stay on (or choose) WordPress when:
- You depend on a specific plugin ecosystem — complex membership, LMS, or WooCommerce-style commerce — that would be expensive to rebuild.
- Your team is deeply trained on the WordPress editor and the switching cost outweighs the performance gain.
- The site is app-like, with lots of authenticated, per-user, dynamic content where static generation buys you little.
If none of those apply and the site’s job is to load fast and rank, Astro wins on the metrics that matter.
How a move actually works
Switching platforms sounds risky mostly because of SEO. It doesn’t have to be — the equity lives in your URLs and structured data, and both can be preserved. We cover the exact redirect-and-validation method in how to migrate off WordPress without losing your search rankings, and we run the whole thing as a fixed-scope engagement under our migrate service.
FAQ
Is Astro actually faster than WordPress, or does a caching plugin close the gap? Caching plugins help WordPress serve HTML faster, but they don’t remove the JavaScript a theme and plugins still load on the client. Astro’s advantage is structural — it ships zero JS by default — so it starts ahead of an optimized WordPress page rather than catching up to it.
Will moving from WordPress to Astro hurt my SEO? Not if URLs and structured data are preserved with proper 301 redirects. A traffic drop after re-platforming is almost always broken redirects, not the new platform. See our migration process for the exact method.
Can non-technical people edit an Astro site? Yes — Astro handles the rendering and you pair it with a headless CMS for editing. We use Sanity, which gives non-technical teams a friendly editor without touching code or deployments.
Is WordPress less secure than Astro? WordPress isn’t insecure by nature, but its plugin model creates a large, constantly changing attack surface — 91% of 2025 WordPress vulnerabilities were in plugins. A static Astro site has no server-side runtime or database to attack, which removes that category of risk entirely.
Does Astro cost more than WordPress? Up front, usually yes — it’s a real build rather than installing a theme. Over time, usually no: static hosting is free or near-free, and you skip the recurring cost of plugin licenses, managed PHP hosting, and ongoing security patching.