Astro plus a small admin is a real alternative to WordPress, Wix,
and Squarespace

A small business asks for a website. The reflex answer for the last fifteen years has been WordPress. The reflex for the last five has been Wix or Squarespace. Both reflexes are starting to look outdated.

Here's the alternative I keep reaching for: Astro for the site, a small backend API for dynamic bits, and a thin admin UI for editing. It's not novel — it's just the obvious thing once you stop assuming a CMS has to come bundled with the site.

What you actually need from a CMS

Strip away the marketing pages and a small business site needs:

1. Editable content. Hero copy, services, testimonials, blog posts, contact details. Maybe ten to thirty editable surfaces.
2. A working contact form. That's it. Most "dynamic" features on a small business site are this.
3. Image management. Upload, replace, alt text.
4. Someone non-technical can update it without breaking it.

That list does not require WordPress. It does not require a hosted page builder. It requires content storage you can edit, a form handler, and somewhere to put images.

What the static-first stack looks like

• Astro renders the site. Pages are mostly static HTML — fast, cheap, indexable, accessible by default.
• A small backend API handles the few things that need a server: contact form submission, content reads from the database, image uploads. On Cloudflare Workers this is essentially free at small business traffic.
• A thin admin UI at /admin gives the client a form-based editor for the content they need to change. No drag-and-drop, no plugin marketplace, no page builder — just the fields that matter for their site.
• D1, Postgres, or even YAML files for storage, depending on how dynamic the content is.

The whole thing fits in one repo, deploys in seconds, and costs in the order of dollars per month rather than per visitor.

How it compares

vs. WordPress

WordPress's strength is the plugin ecosystem. Its weaknesses are everything else: forced updates that break sites, plugin sprawl, mediocre performance unless you cache aggressively, and a constant low-grade security tax. For a small business that needs five pages and a contact form, the plugin ecosystem is a liability — every plugin is a future maintenance bill.

A custom Astro site has only the features you actually use. If a feature isn't there, nothing breaks because of it.

vs. Wix and Squarespace

These are great for someone building their own site in a weekend. They get worse the longer you use them:

• Performance ceiling. Their templates ship a lot of JavaScript you can't strip out. Lighthouse scores tend to live in the 50s and 60s on mobile.
• Lock-in. Your content lives in their database, their templates, their domain DNS. Migration off is a project.
• Monthly cost compounds. $25–$50/month forever, with the price climbing every couple of years.
• You can't extend it. Need a custom integration? You're rewriting the site somewhere else.

A static Astro site you own runs at near-100 Lighthouse scores by default, costs $5/month to host, and you can change anything about it because it's just code.

Where this stack genuinely doesn't fit

I want to be honest about this:

• Sites with hundreds of editors. WordPress's role/permission system is mature. A custom admin built for one client is the wrong shape here.
• Marketplaces and complex e-commerce. Shopify exists for a reason. Don't try to rebuild it.
• Clients who want to self-serve a redesign. If they want to drag blocks around and pick fonts every Tuesday, Squarespace is the right answer.

If none of those apply — and for most small businesses, none do — the calculus tilts hard toward owning the stack.

What "owning the stack" actually means

The most underrated benefit isn't performance or cost. It's that the client owns their site outright. The code is in their GitHub. The database is in their Cloudflare account. There's no vendor that can deprecate a feature, raise prices, or hold the site hostage.

That ownership shows up in small ways for years. Migrating to a new host is an afternoon. Adding an integration is a feature, not a plugin. Changing the design doesn't mean rebuilding from scratch on a different platform.

For the studio building it, the upside is that every site is a real, maintainable codebase rather than a ball of plugins glued together. The boring kind of compounding.

When you might want this

If you're a small business owner who:

• Wants a site that's fast, cheap to run, and yours,
• Has a clear sense of what you need to edit (and what you don't),
• And isn't trying to redesign your own site every other month,

— this stack is probably what you should be asking for. Get in touch if you'd like to talk it through.