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by johnchristopher 555 days ago
> I understand what you're saying, people framework hop and what's popular does change frequently, but we're not all using Frontpage still, are we?

yeah, we switched to WordPress. I am glad we didn't follow up on our web agency 5 years ago to switch to gasby. Our wordpress is still running fine. I am glad we are not considering switching to Astro, since wordpress will still be there in 5 years.

1 comments

Will WordPress be there in 5 years? Regardless, it has a cost.

It's hard to compound a conversation about cost on the backdrop of agencies. A lifetime ago I worked at agencies that predominantly leaned on WordPress. WP is a complex, dynamic webapp, running 24/7. A long history of security holes both in itself but more in the fleet of community plugins that agencies install by default, and the "one click" hosting software they lean on (cpanel et al) to avoid hiring actual operations teams all cause problems. Deployments are objectively awful and demand scrappy maintenance work over an amount of regular server time.

Once a static Astro site is built, that HTML is static and safe, forever. Cloudflare, AWS, Github, and a hundred others will host it for you, for free. Just pay for the domain.

We charged clients £100pm+ just for treading water with WP and there wasn't profit in that. WP does allow clients to make changes themselves but in my experience agency clients need brand and graphics support. The cost of updating a website is insignificant to regular graphics work.

I can't say what sort of client you are, but we're looking at a cost saving of £6k in five years by not having some underqualified junior babysit a server.

The output is better on Astro too. Usually. I'm sure an agency could find a way to make an awful Astro site.

> Will WordPress be there in 5 years? Regardless, it has a cost.

WordPress will probably be around in 5 years, but I don't think anyone can say that the plugin ecosystem and open source community that WordPress heavily depends on would, especially with what has been going on in the past months.