Most of my client sites ended up with the same stack: a page builder, a forms plugin, a popup plugin, a cookie banner, an SEO plugin, a slider, a caching plugin to undo what the others added, and a security plugin to keep an eye on all of them. Every one adds its own CSS and JS to the front end, and every one is another thing to update.

Over the last days I tried a different setup on a few sites: keep WordPress only as the place where content is written for client that still want to maintain their sites, and build the public site as static pages that read from it at build time (Astro, in my case).

I ended up building a visual editor for the front end part, because writing every template by hand was the slow part. Not linking it here since this sub isn't for promotion, but happy to share in the comments if anyone wants it.

What changed

- Editors noticed nothing.
They still write in wp-admin and press Publish. A publish triggers a rebuild through the host's deploy hook, and the post is live a minute later.

- Most front-end plugins became unnecessary.
Forms, popups, consent, sliders and SEO markup are part of the front end now, built on native HTML where possible instead of plugin scripts.

- No caching plugin needed.
The pages are static HTML on a CDN, and JavaScript loads only where something actually needs it. No page builder markup, no plugin assets on every page.

- Much smaller attack surface.
Visitors never touch WordPress or PHP. The WordPress install can sit on a subdomain, stay out of search engines, and send visitors to the static site. WordPress itself still needs updates, of course, but there's far less exposed.

- URLs stayed the same, so no redirect spreadsheet and no lost rankings.

- ACF fields come through the REST API
as plain fields, which made custom post types easy.

Which plugin or workflow would you miss the most if the front end were static?