The Standard
The big picture 58 to 100 — the rebuild at a glance
The Brief
- WordPress + Divi: 58 performance, 77 accessibility
- Database query on every visit
- Plugins break, login is a target
The Approach
- Hand-coded Astro, versioned in GitHub
- Built once, served from Cloudflare's edge
- No database, no plugins, free hosting
The Proof
- 100 across all four Lighthouse categories
- Accessibility 77 → 100, the hardest to move
- Agentic browsing 1/2 → 3/3
What It Means For You
- Under a second, nothing to hack
- Maintenance moves to content, not patching
- Right tool for the job — WordPress when it fits
PERFORMANCE IS PRESTIGE.
Case Study — the studio, rebuilt to its own standard.
I’ve been building websites for thirty years — from table layouts to today. I’ve migrated through every era of this craft, so I know the difference between a trend and the ground actually shifting. I started the GitHub Astro method, deployed on Cloudflare, yesterday. I’m already onboard. For the first time in a long time, I can see the future of how we build.
So I held my own front door to the standard I sell, and rebuilt it.
The Brief
The old site ran WordPress with Divi. Tested on the old stack, it scored 58 on performance and 77 on accessibility. Functional — but carrying the tax every WordPress site pays: a database query on every visit, plugin and theme updates that each break something eventually, and a public login that’s a standing target. A cheap suit. It looks fine until someone who knows fabric shakes your hand.
The mandate was simple: rebuild it to the baseline I refuse to deploy below.
The Approach — The GitHub Astro Method, Deployed on Cloudflare
The site is hand-coded in Astro, version-controlled in GitHub, compiled to static files once, and deployed to Cloudflare’s edge. No database. No plugins. Nothing assembled on demand.
A page is built one time, then copied to data centers worldwide. A visitor in Atlanta is served from Atlanta. The file loads in under a second because there’s no work left to do — it’s already finished. There’s nothing to hack, because there’s no database and no plugin code sitting there to exploit. And the hosting bill is gone: Cloudflare serves it for free.
Thirty years in, that’s the part that stopped me. Same web, completely different machine underneath.
The Proof Is in the Telemetry
Verified Deployment Telemetry
| Metric | Before — WordPress | After — Astro |
|---|---|---|
| Accessibility | 77 | 100 |
| Performance | 58 | 100 |
| Best Practices | 96 | 100 |
| SEO | 92 | 100 |
| Agentic Browsing | 1/2 | 3/3 |
A clean 100 across all four Lighthouse categories — the baseline for deployment, not a goal. Accessibility leads on purpose: 77 to 100 is the hardest number of the five to move, and it’s the one that proves the rebuild was structural, not paint.
Don’t take my word for it. Run it yourself:
Mobile Results → · Desktop Results → · Test Your Speeds →
Absolute Velocity Sub-second First Contentful Paint. The page is served from the Cloudflare edge node nearest your visitor — finished before it arrives.
Semantic Precision Clean accessibility and structured data, 100 on automated audits, fully legible to Google’s rendering engine.
Agent-Ready A static page is complete HTML the moment it loads — the exact thing an AI crawler reads before it decides whom to cite. A heavy, half-rendered page shows that crawler a blank. This one shows it everything.
What This Means For You
A site built with the GitHub Astro method on Cloudflare loads in under a second, has no database to break into, no plugins to patch, and no monthly host. Maintenance doesn’t disappear — it moves off patching and onto the content that keeps you in the answer. And when WordPress is the right tool for the job, I still build it. Thirty years has taught me there’s no one right tool — only the right one for the work in front of you.
This was the right one for mine.
The build you commission is the build you’re reading.