Hello everyone! As the vast majority of our readers know, at SiloCreativo we breathe WordPress. We have spent more than a decade designing, developing, and selling themes and templates for the most used CMS on the internet. We know it inside out, it is our go-to tool and, for almost any client project that walks through the door, it is our first choice. It is our home!
However, over the past year, we found ourselves at a technical crossroads. We started developing Normatia, our own SaaS aimed at digitizing, connecting, and consulting all architectural regulations in Spain using AI.
When we sat down in front of the blank whiteboard to outline the technological Stack, we had to make a decision that, emotionally, was difficult: we decided to set WordPress aside for the core of this product and blindly bet on Astro. Today we want to reflect with you on this decision. We will tell you why, sometimes, you have to step out of your comfort zone and choose the right tool for the right problem. Let’s dive in!
The problem with dynamic rendering in a massive SaaS
Let’s start from the beginning. WordPress is an absolute marvel at managing dynamic content. Its ecosystem of Plugins and its ability to spin up a Backend in minutes is unrivaled. But its underlying architecture, based on PHP and constant database requests, has an inherent performance cost.
For a corporate blog, a portfolio, or even a standard ecommerce site, this latency issue is easily solved. You install a good caching plugin, configure a CDN, optimize your images, and boom, you have a blazing-fast website. But Normatia is not a typical blog. Normatia is a massive, interconnected documentary database. We are talking about thousands and thousands of legal articles, complex tables, technical annexes, and cross-references that users (architects and engineers) consult constantly and at high speed through a semantic search engine.
That being said, processing each of these document views on the server with PHP in real-time was an unacceptable bottleneck. It is as if, in a fast-food restaurant, the chef had to go out and plant tomatoes in the garden every time a customer ordered a burger with salad. We needed something radically different, something that would allow us to serve heavy information at the speed of light.
Understanding the paradigm: Static Sites vs. Dynamic Sites
In our quest for absolute speed, we turned our eyes to static site generators. The premise is simple: if the content of a law (like the Technical Building Code) doesn’t change every day, why spend server resources rendering it every time someone reads it?
That is where the SSG (Static Site Generation) philosophy makes perfect sense. We wanted to pre-build all the legal pages during the Deploy process. Thus, when the server finished its job, the only thing left in the public folder would be thousands of pure, raw HTML files.
The result of this architecture is obvious: when the user clicks on a regulatory article, the page loads literally instantly. There are no MySQL queries, no PHP Loops processing, no database checks. The server simply hands the browser an HTML file that was already prepared beforehand. The WPO (Web Performance Optimization) and SEO metrics we achieved with this strategy are simply brutal, hitting a 100/100 on Google PageSpeed.
Getting to work: Astro and its Island Architecture
Within the ecosystem of modern Frontend Frameworks (Next.js, Nuxt, Gatsby), Astro has won our developer hearts. The reason? It shares a philosophy that we have always defended at SiloCreativo: less useless JavaScript and more pure HTML.
Astro was born with a fantastic premise: strip away all client-side JavaScript by default. If you create a React or Vue component and drop it into Astro, it renders it as static HTML and removes the interactive weight. But what if you need real interactivity? Here comes the magic.
Astro uses a revolutionary concept called “Island Architecture”. This means that the entire web is an ocean of fast, static HTML, but you can define small interactive “islands” where JavaScript does execute.
In our case, the text of the law, the Header, and the Footer are pure HTML with zero loading cost. But our smart search engine and our AI chat assistant are React “Islands”. We only load JavaScript exactly where the user critically needs it, keeping the overall Layout as light as a feather. It’s the best of both worlds: the speed of the 90s web with the interactivity of modern 2026 applications.
The Developer Experience (DX)
Learning a new Framework is always a bit dizzying, but the learning curve for Astro has been a very pleasant walk in the park. For those of us who come from creating code tutorials and fighting with PHP template hierarchies, the way components are structured in Astro is a breath of fresh air.
The file-based Routing system (where your folder structure automatically defines your URLs) eliminates the need to configure complex routers. Additionally, native support for Markdown and MDX has been vital for us. We manage a large part of the regulation annexes and documentation directly in MDX files, allowing us to write formatted text while injecting interactive UI components (like technical calculators) right in the middle of the paragraphs.
Does this mean we are abandoning WordPress?
Not at all, not by a long shot! WordPress remains the undisputed king for content websites, digital magazines, online stores with WooCommerce, and corporate pages. Its ability to empower the end-user to manage their own website is still unrivaled in the industry.
But working with Astro allows us to separate responsibilities. Therefore, to build the internal “engine” of the web application, the SaaS itself, we have learned that separating the hyper-optimized Frontend (Astro) from our Backend (the database and AI) gives us flexibility and scalability that a traditional monolithic CMS simply cannot offer us.
And you, have you taken the leap to try modern Frameworks like Astro, Next, or Svelte, or do you still solve absolutely all your web developments under the WordPress umbrella? We will read you in the comments, surely there is a super interesting debate ahead! 😉
