WordPress, Next.js or Astro? How we choose the right stack

“Which technology should we build on?” is one of the first questions clients ask us, and the honest answer is always “it depends”. Not as a way of avoiding the question, but because the right stack depends far more on your team and your content than on what is fashionable this year.

These are the three platforms we recommend most often, and how we decide between them.

WordPress: when your team runs the website

WordPress powers a huge share of the web for a reason. It gives non-technical teams a familiar editor, a mature ecosystem and the freedom to publish without waiting for a developer.

We recommend it when:

• Several people will publish and edit content every week.
• You need blogs, landing pages, forms and SEO tools that just work.
• You want a large pool of developers and agencies who can support the site in future.

The trade-off is maintenance. Plugins and themes need regular updates and a good host. We build custom themes like this one, with very few plugins, so the site stays fast and secure.

Next.js: when the website behaves like an application

Next.js is a React framework for interfaces that do more than display content: customer portals, dashboards, booking flows, configurators and anything that talks to several systems at once.

It is the right choice when your site needs logged-in areas, complex interactions or tight integration with APIs and databases. Content usually lives in a headless CMS, so editors still get a friendly interface while developers get full control of the front end.

The trade-off is that a Next.js project needs developers to make structural changes, and hosting is a little more involved than a standard WordPress install.

Astro: when speed and content come first

Astro builds pages that ship almost no JavaScript by default, which makes it brilliant for marketing sites, documentation and content-heavy websites where speed and search visibility matter most. You can still add interactive “islands” exactly where they are needed.

We reach for Astro when a site is mostly content, changes a few times a month rather than every day, and has demanding performance goals.

The questions we actually ask

Rather than starting with the technology, we start with five questions:

1. Who will update the website, and how often? Daily publishing by a marketing team points strongly towards WordPress or a headless CMS.
2. What does the site need to do beyond showing content? Accounts, payments and integrations push us towards Next.js or a custom build.
3. How important is raw speed? For content sites with strict performance goals, Astro is hard to beat.
4. What is your budget for ongoing maintenance? Every platform needs care; some need more than others.
5. Who will look after it in three years? A stack your future team can hire for matters more than one that is exciting today.

The best stack is the one that still makes sense when the project team has moved on and your business is twice the size.

Sometimes the answer is “both”

Many of our projects combine tools: WordPress as the editing experience with a fast front end, or an Astro marketing site sitting alongside a Next.js customer portal. What matters is that every choice has a reason your team understands.

If you are weighing up platforms for your next project, we are always happy to talk it through, with no obligation and no jargon.