But it has a CMS? The author said that replaced WordPress sites with Astro, and on https://astro.build/ I see a comparison to WordPress.
Astro brings a friendly UI to maintain and update the sites? Like the WordPress panel and editor.
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It doesn't, which is why all these solutions breakdown long-term compared to things like WP for small biz brochure stuff. 5 to 10 years from now when you're no longer talking to your client who has absolutely no technical experience, they're not gonna know that their website code is in some random GitHub repository that needs to be compiled with vite and then you need to magically wait for Netlify/etc to pull in your changes. They'll probably be fuming they have to find a developer that knows how to edit and manage that compared to something like WordPress which is used for the majority of those websites.
For a small business that simply displays an informational site, but occasionally needs to add content, a post on a blog or a change in the text or similar, it is sufficient to build a simple infrastructure of reading some markdown files and let them SFTP some markdown files and have periodic backups. One could also go as far as automatically committing those user uploaded files to a repo. None of which is difficult to do.
It does get more complicated, if the small business wants users to be able to message them through the website, not just via e-mail. Or if the business suddenly wants to have a shop functionality on the site. Then CMSs start to slowly become an option.
Many medium businesses don't even need that btw. In many instances marketing people just want to have control over websites, that they should not be given control over, since they usually are incapable of knowing the impact of what they are doing, when they add something like Google tagmanager to their site. They also tend to often break things, when using Wordpress, because they do not understand how it works under the hood, so that side of things is also not without hassle. And then the devs are called to fix what marketing broke. Even with Wordpress. At that point it would often be easier to let the devs build a non-Wordpress site, and any ideas about things that are not just content in markdown files need to be requests for the dev team to evaluate, and possibly work on, when deemed safe and lawful.
Sadly the power dynamics in businesses are often stacked against conscientious developers.
> let them SFTP some markdown files
Have you ever worked with any SMBs before? This is at least 5 technical levels above their head. Would make as much sense as telling them, "just use this CLI tool".
We're talking about people who will email you from their phone that the website is down, but it turns out it's just their home internet that is down.
Or think that the website disappeared from the internet. When in reality it's now the #2 result in google and they never knew they you could type a URL directly into the browser.
It would be cheaper to hire a dev to update some content than to pay a wp host for 5-10 years.
I just did a search for "wordpress hosting" and picked one of the first results without shopping around, and the (clearly overpriced) plan I saw was $9.99/mo. In ten years that'd be $1200.
A WP deployment on a simple shared hosting plan like that could run itself without needed a dev or sysadmin.
> A WP deployment on a simple shared hosting plan like that could run itself without needed a dev or sysadmin
Maybe in some cases but that hasn't been my experience at all (or the experience of all the devs I know IRL).
Just a couple of weeks ago one of my clients installed a plugin which didn't allow users to log in.
Well a good step is to never give your clients full admin permissions in WP so that they can install plugins or mess with theme files.
And then come the WP plugin license fees, which easily quadrupel that cost, if not more. Just the other day I have seen a WP instance, that has >50 plugins installed, some of which cost 800 Euro per year. They are lock-in traps for hapless marketing and other non-technical people, who are convinced that they definitely need this super-duper plugin.
And then come the legal fees for making the site actually conforming with the law, such as GDPR. Those fees are increased, because of people wanting to do stuff they need to declare to visitors of the site, for which they want reassurance, that all is well.
And then come the costs for paying a dev anyway, to fix things that they break or that become broken over time.
So no, 9.99$/month are very very far from a realistic price these businesses pay.
Well we have hosted 10 small business WP sites per $10 DigitalOcean droplet for the last decade. There are not additional plugin costs on any of them. And there has been no real maintenance needed.
I'm not saying WP is great. Taking over a WP project from someone else can be daunting in tech debt and weird choices. But in terms of having a simple brochure website for businesses that get < 10k weekly visitors, it's pretty quick, cheap, and easy.
Reality check: So you have no forms any user needs to input anything into, because if you had any, then you would need a spam protection, lest your customer gets tons of spam. Cheapest one is probably Askimet, but that costs money for a business. So either you are talking about little blogs, or not businesses. In any case, probably real small sites of purely informational character without user input, otherwise it would cost something. Or you are letting your customers get spammed.
No real maintenance? So either you let your PHP version and plugins become outdated, or you sooner or later have to fix things breaking. Maybe you simply did not notice any breakage, because you don't do maintenance for customers?
A brochure website? Does that mean people enter their e-mail to be sent a brochure? (Then paragraph 1 applies again) Or brochure meaning, that you merely display information on pages and that's it?
I think for small info sites what you describe can be true, but for anything slightly larger not, especially not for small businesses.
Not sure if anything major has changed recently, but I think you bring your own CMS. I've used Astro successfully with Strapi, for example.
If they need to bring in a CMS to edit content and juggle assets they could have used Wordpress in headless mode, which the customer was already used to…
Eg. https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/glossary/headless-wordpress/