From WordPress to Astro — how this site gets built
Cloudflare Pages, Astro, Sveltia CMS, and Cursor (with Spokenly or SayWrite) — and what it feels like after years on WordPress.
I’ve been putting this site together with Astro, hosting on Cloudflare Pages, editing content through Sveltia CMS (Git-backed, Decap-compatible), and building features in Cursor. That stack is a different world from WordPress, which I know inside out — and the learning curve has been real.
What I’m trying to understand
WordPress gives you a mature platform: themes, plugins, admin UI, and a huge ecosystem. Here, the site is mostly static Markdown and data files in the repo, compiled by Astro into fast HTML. Cloudflare Pages picks up commits and publishes. Sveltia lets me edit notes and projects in a browser without touching raw files for every change — but the mental model is still “content in Git, build, deploy,” not “log into wp-admin and click Publish.”
Both approaches have trade-offs.
WordPress — pros: familiar workflows, rich plugins, non-developers can run a site easily, instant preview in the admin.
WordPress — cons: hosting, updates, security, and performance tuning can become a job of their own if you care about speed and simplicity.
This stack — pros: very fast pages, simple hosting on Cloudflare’s free tier, no PHP or database to babysit, and version control is the source of truth.
This stack — cons: you need comfort with Git, build pipelines, and occasionally opening the project in an editor when the CMS doesn’t cover something.
For a personal site like this, speed and hosting simplicity are major draws. I don’t miss managing a traditional LAMP-style setup for what is essentially marketing pages, app listings, and occasional notes.
Cursor, Spokenly, and SayWrite
The other piece that’s changed how I work is Cursor, together with Spokenly or SayWrite. I can talk through what I want — layout, copy, new sections — and iterate in the editor with AI assistance. It feels closer to dictating the site into existence than hand-typing every file from scratch. That doesn’t remove the need to understand Astro or Cloudflare, but it lowers the friction while I’m still learning this style of site building.
I’m sure I’ll refine this setup over time. For now, this note is a marker: first published entry, and a snapshot of why I chose this path over staying on the platform I already knew.