Why I Ditched WordPress and Elementor for a Faster, Freer Astro Site
I’ve had a WordPress site for years. It did the job, mostly thanks to the Elementor Pro plugin which made building pages easy. But recently, I had to make a change. When Elementor made their support for Israel public I knew I couldn’t continue using their products. (And later I found out that they were an Israeli company.)
My principles come first. Free Palestine.
What made it worse was that when I raised concerns about their LinkedIn post, I got banned from the Elementor Facebook group – a community where I had contributed significantly over the years. It was clear that dissenting voices weren’t welcome.
This pushed me to find a better, more ethical alternative. It turned out to be a great decision.
The New Stack: Astro, AI, and MDX
I decided to move my blog to Astro, a modern static site builder. The goal was to recreate my site without the bloat of WordPress and to find a workflow that was faster and more flexible.
Here’s where it gets interesting. I used the AI-powered IDE Cursor to do most of the heavy lifting. I was basically “vibecoding” with AI assistants – mainly Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. I’d describe what I needed, and the AI would generate the code. In just a couple of evenings, I had a brand-new site that looked and felt just like my old one.
Astro is great because it handles static content but also lets you use other frameworks for interactive parts. I’m using Vue.js components to power things like the site menu and the search functionality. It lets me add dynamic features exactly where I need them without slowing the rest of the site down.
A Better Way to Blog
One of the biggest hurdles in any site migration is the content. I needed to get all my old posts out of WordPress and into a format Astro could use. For this, I used a fantastic tool called wordpress-export-to-markdown. It converted all my WordPress posts to Markdown, extracted the images into the right folders, and even generated the necessary frontmatter for the MDX files. It saved me hours of manual work.
Now, my entire workflow is much cleaner. The best part is working with MDX files directly. Unlike the clunky WordPress editor, MDX lets me write in simple Markdown but with the power of interactive components. My plan is to connect my Astro project to Obsidian, the note-taking app I use daily. This means I can write a blog post in Obsidian, and it will be ready to publish almost instantly.
Free and Fast with Cloudflare
Another big win is the cost. With WordPress and Elementor, I was paying for hosting and premium plugins. My new Astro site is deployed on Cloudflare Pages for free. It’s faster for visitors because it’s a static site, and it costs me nothing to host.
Final Thoughts
Moving away from WordPress and Elementor felt like a statement I needed to make. But it also massively improved my workflow. Using AI to code the site and clever tools to migrate the content made the process quick and painless. The combination of Astro, Vue, and free hosting on Cloudflare is a perfect setup for me. It’s faster, cheaper, and aligns with my values.
It’s a no brainer. It’s a win-win.