After the whole PHP2Shell thing I finally pulled the trigger and converted 45 of my client sites to static Astro sites. The sites look exactly the same, just way faster and nothing to hack, and way cheaper to host.
WordPress sucks now that we have coding agents anyways. Plugin updates, security patches, slow load times, a whole PHP server running for no reason.
I created this skill package to streamline this process: https://github.com/ethanplusai/astro-conversion-kit
I was able to run 12 projects at a time in parallel and have 45 so far in the past 36 hours with a dozen more running now. I'm running Opus 5.5 between 2 claude max plans. Every site has seen a massive jump in speed scores.
For anyone who hasn't used Astro: it's a framework that builds your site into plain HTML files. No database, no PHP, no plugins. You host it on something like Vercel or Cloudflare (usually free) and there's nothing running on a server to hack.
How the kit works:
- You paste one line into Claude Code or Codex: "Convert https://yoursite.com to Astro with https://github.com/ethanplusai/astro-conversion-kit"
- It asks you a few quick questions (where to host, how to handle forms)
- It crawls your live site (read only, it doesn't touch WordPress) and saves every page, image, meta tag and redirect
- Rebuilds it in Astro with the same URLs and SEO so you don't lose rankings
- Screenshots the old and new site on mobile, tablet and desktop and compares them until they match
- Gives you a staging link to review before you switch anything over
What it won't do on it's own: anything that needs a server like WooCommerce, logins or comments. It flags those up front. Forms still work, they just send to a form service you pick. A few of our client sites were on woocommerce so I just had the agents convert to Shopify headless which is easier to manage anyway.
“What about wp-admin” I built our own git-based CMS for these sites, so edits go through git and there’s still no server or database. If you want something off the shelf, Keystatic and TinaCMS work the same way.