From WordPress to Astro — how websites get built ten times faster and cheaper

ciqualia.com ran on WordPress until the end of August 2026. Since then the site has been built with Astro, and new content is made in a chat with an AI assistant. The figures in this guide come from this site.

Why WordPress gets expensive

With WordPress, nearly every change to the content starts as a technical one. A new page needs a new template or a changed one. The template has to fit the theme, the plugins and the customisations made so far, and only when it stands can anyone write the text.

At ciqualia.com a developer team did that, at about €40 an hour. Changes added up to tens of hours every month, and each one took at least two weeks — questions, coordination, testing and rework included. On top of that came paid premium plugins whose updates are tied to a paid licence.

But let’s recap — what was a CMS meant for?

Let’s stop for a minute and ask why CMSs exist at all. A content management system was meant to let people publish content without dealing with technology. In a WordPress installation that has grown over the years, the technology comes back through templates and plugins.

Today an AI assistant can take on that role. The editors describe in a chat what should change; the assistant writes the text and the code, checks the result and publishes when told to. The precondition is that the technical requirements, the limits, the rollback and the checks on a test environment are laid down carefully once.

It is the same principle as the Agentic OS for the back office: rules that apply to every task, repeatable tasks, and results that are checked before a task is closed.

Why Astro

Astro builds finished HTML from components and content files. There is no database, no PHP and no admin interface to maintain and secure. The content lives as files in the repository, one per language, and every change is a traceable version.

For an AI assistant that is the right place to work: it reads and writes files instead of clicking through an interface, and each of its changes can be reviewed, checked and undone.

What is laid down once

For the editors to work in the chat alone, someone lays down once what the site is, what is checked before every release and how a mistake is undone. This is stored as a skill or plugin of the AI assistant and applies to every task from then on.

At ciqualia.com this includes, for example: every change to the content applies to all nine languages at once. Every page appears first on the stage, a test copy of the site. And a checklist run before every release checks titles, descriptions, language links, images and the layout on desktop, tablet and phone.

The editors work in the chat only

The editors need to know nothing about git, pull requests or build pipelines. They write a task in the chat — say, “New page on ISO 13485 modelled on the ISO 9001 page, in all languages” — look at the result on the stage, name corrections and finally say: “Publish to production.”

The figures: hours instead of weeks

The time comes from the assistant’s logs: twelve tasks since October 2026, measured from the task in the chat to the change ready for approval. The median was about an hour and a half of work and about four hours in all; it took longer only when a task waited overnight for an answer.

• A new standard page on ISO 13485 in nine languages, modelled on an existing one: just over an hour.
• An About page replacing the contact page, in nine languages: about 1.3 hours.
• Internal links to two new pages from every page where they fit: eight minutes.
• The largest tasks, a product catalogue and an industry page: four to five hours.

The move itself was quick too: the first line of code was written on 4 August 2026, and on 29 August the new site replaced WordPress on ciqualia.com. Since then about twenty new pages and five articles have been added, each in nine languages.

On cost, tens of developer hours at €40 — €800 or more a month — stand against €20. On time, two weeks stand against a few hours. Both are more than an order of magnitude.

Faster and cheaper does not mean worse. This is how the usual testing tools rate the ciqualia.com home page, on mobile and desktop alike:

• PageSpeed Insights: Performance 100, Accessibility 95, Best Practices 100, SEO 100, Agentic Browsing 3 of 3.
• Ahrefs Site Audit: Health Score 100 — none of the site’s internal URLs has an error.

What replaces the plugins

Before the move, take stock: which plugins are installed, and what job does each of them do? At ciqualia.com little of them was left:

Taking stock is also an audit. At ciqualia.com the code of the old plugins held three things that were deliberately left behind: certificate checking switched off for the hand-over to the CRM, error reports sent to a private mailbox, and two competing SMTP plugins.

Moving without losing search

The old site’s sitemap listed 80 addresses. Each one got a decision:

• 16 exist on the new site at the same address. They need no rule.
• 11 have a successor under another path and are redirected permanently (301), with and without the trailing slash.
• 53 answer 404 on purpose: the portfolio, job ads, old service pages, test pages and tag archives.

On the day of the switch:

1. Point DNS at the new server.
2. Purge robots.txt from the CDN cache — otherwise it keeps pointing to the old SEO plugin’s sitemap for hours.
3. Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console.
4. Expect more 404 responses: they follow from the decisions above.
5. Spot-check the redirects and send a test request through the form.

Data protection built in

Less technology also means fewer data protection questions. The old site used Google Analytics and a cookie banner. The new one does without cookies on purpose, statistics cookies included, and so needs no banner: a visitor starts reading at once instead of first clicking away a consent dialog. Personal data arises only in the contact form. The AI assistant works with code and text, not with visitors’ data.

What is processed all the same — the contact form, sending mail, hosting — belongs in the record of processing activities. Complaica keeps that record and keeps track of the data protection tasks; more on the pages on GDPR software and data protection management.

Finally: screenshots in nine languages

One question remains that multilingual sites often stumble over: how do screenshots of your own software get into every language? A German picture beside French text looks careless, and every new version of the software makes all the pictures outdated at once.

At ciqualia.com the product views are therefore not photos anyone takes by hand. Each view is rebuilt as a component with the software’s translated texts and rendered as a page of its own for every language. A script opens these pages in a Chrome browser without a window (headless), photographs them and stores the pictures at several widths as AVIF and WebP — about 2,000 files, made with one command. When a text or a colour changes, the assistant takes the pictures again.

For the product tours, the same Chrome signs in to a local demo of the real application, opens the modules and photographs them at desktop size. The layout check before every release works the same way: screenshots at three widths that the assistant looks at itself.

Ask us how

Ciqualia builds websites this way and sets up the process for your team: the rules, the checks, the stage and the skill for the AI assistant. For more on software development and replacing existing applications, see Pragmatica; for AI integration, see Gnostica.

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