I wouldn’t drop WordPress for Astro - but I did for Hugo. Never been happier.

My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.

With AI assistance, we migrated to Hugo in three days. 800+ pages. 15 reusable components. Zero plugin chaos. Permissions handled at the git level. A simple HTML form to upload images and paste articles for less technical people, most were fine with markdown already. GitHub Actions for cleanup, validation, and spellchecking. Attack surface minimized. Performance improved drastically.

I’ll stand behind this: most people don’t need a bloated CMS. They need clarity on what they want to achieve, a solid process, and software that turns that process into a system.

A recurring theme of the AI rollout era is ppl thinking that AIs render a technology or process obsolete.

CMS's like wordpress don't solve the problem of allowing non-technical people to manage a website. They solve the problem of allowing you to separate the content of your website from the logic of it.

Now of course these tools will change to be used by Agents, but honestly probably less than you'd think. AIs are very good at interacting with software like humans, so the transition will be pretty small

Still can’t believe there is no true open source cms that sits on top of a Postgres db. Like. Yea you have payload but you are locked into nextjs. Just a cms that hooks into openapi or Postgres natively would be great. I still prefer Django over anything else now days.

Wordpress specifically ended up in no man’s land for us. Not powerful enough for big sites with complex content types and design systems, and too big of a pain for ephemeral microsites. For the latter we switched to Squarespace years ago, and are now exploring AI options.

I agree with the sentiment against blindly jumping into the AI wagon from CMS, but the author seems mixing that from the migration from CMS into markdown content + static site generation.

To me the latter is a legit move and much cleaner architecture for most sites. And the issue of editing code, or really just markdown files, seems to be a solvable UI problem with good editors like Obsidian, or something similar but more tailored for website building.

The same way coding agents don’t replace the need for an IDE, content generation needs to support arbitrary human-to-agent handoffs, where the human can say “this is the wrong direction, I sketched this change of what I want it to look like, see how it’s different and apply that pattern.”

And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.

CMS is pretty much alive, even if most of them are now headless, oriented towards MACH deployments and AI based workflows.

> But that idea is old enough to drink

Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except for you, op.

> Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town, and suggested the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS (he’s since migrated again to EmDash, which I talk about later)

That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article)

> Migrated his personal blog

Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.

> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town

I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?

> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS

Is it? People still haven't accepted this?

Wordpress, like SQL, is probably immortal.

But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.