The short answer for a contractor or small shop
For a local service site that is mostly pages, a phone number and a form, build it static on Astro. Astro builds the pages ahead of time and serves them as finished files. Nothing runs on the server when someone visits, and there is no database.
Stay on WordPress if you sell products online, if you want to log in and write something most weeks, or if you need one odd plugin that nothing else does.
You do not lose the ability to change your site. You change how the change gets made. If you add Site Crew, an agent drafts the edit, you approve it, and it goes live.
Where WordPress is genuinely the better pick
More than 60,000 plugins sit in the official directory (WordPress.org plugin directory, read May 2026). Whatever odd thing you need, somebody has built it.
Selling online is the clearest case. WooCommerce has been downloaded more than 456 million times (WordPress.org, read May 2026), and both counts move week to week.
WordPress ran 43.0% of all websites in January 2026 (W3Techs). Almost any web person in your town can already work on it.
The admin panel is the honest advantage. If you want to log in at 9pm and change a page with your own hands, WordPress does that out of the box.
Where Astro wins: speed on a phone
67.8% of Astro sites passed Google’s speed check on phones, against 49.1% of WordPress sites (HTTP Archive, April 2026).
The mechanism is plain. A WordPress page gets built the moment someone asks for it: the server wakes up, queries the database, runs the plugins, then sends it. A static page is already built and just gets handed over. Server response time was rated good on 61.4% of Astro sites and 24.4% of WordPress sites.
Weight matters on a bad signal. The middle Astro page weighed 1.65 MB on a phone, the middle WordPress page 2.76 MB (HTTP Archive, April 2026). Google also checks whether a machine can read a page cleanly, and there the middle Astro site scored 1.00 against 0.92.
Astro does not win everything. On how fast a page answers a tap, Astro scored 86.3% good and WordPress 91.1%.
Run the test on your own site, then on a competitor who outranks you. Two numbers tell you more than any vendor claim. You can see how we build them.
Nothing to update and nothing to hack
Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress world in 2025. Of those, 91% were in plugins. Six were in WordPress core (State of WordPress Security in 2026, published February 2026).
WordPress itself is not the weak part. What gets bolted on is. Plugin and theme auto-updates are off by default (WordPress developer documentation), so the layer most likely to break is the layer that does not update itself. Sucuri looked at the infected sites it cleaned in 2023: 39.1% were running out of date software when they were hit.
It usually goes like this. A shop pays for a site once, nobody is paid to keep it, and it sits for three years while the plugins age.
Static files remove the database and the plugin updates. They do not make you safe. Your email, your domain account and your Google business profile can still be taken.
What each one costs you, and what we cannot promise
WordPress bills you in a quiet month too: hosting, renewals on paid plugins, a maintenance plan or somebody to run updates, and the repair the day an update breaks your contact form. We will not put a number on that, since we cannot find a source we trust.
The galloping.ai tiers are listed on the pricing page. Every tier is a fully hosted, SEO-ready website. Extras stay separate.
Now the parts we cannot back up. We do not publish client results, so the build you can inspect in full is this one. The Astro figures come from about 27,000 sites measured against WordPress’s 2.9 million (HTTP Archive, April 2026), mostly newer sites built by people who chose the tools themselves. It is not a like for like race.
On our build you do not log in and edit pages. If you add Site Crew, an agent drafts the change, you approve it, and it goes in a log you keep. If you want your own hands on the page every day, take WordPress. If you sell hundreds of products, or need logins for your customers, we are the wrong shop: use WordPress or Shopify.
A faster site does not get you calls by itself.
Four questions that tell you which one to build on
Answer these out loud.
- Do you sell products online? WooCommerce on WordPress, or Shopify. Not us.
- Do you want to log in and write something yourself most weeks? Take the admin panel. That is a fair reason on its own.
- Is anyone actually paying for monthly upkeep? If nobody is, do not build on something that needs patching. Static files sit still.
- Do most of your visitors arrive on a phone? For most trades, yes. A phone is where page weight hurts most.
Before you decide, run the free scan. We check what AI says about your business when someone asks who to call in your town. Start the request by email. Ask if you want a call.