Every Question I Get About Building Websites With AI, Answered
A former WordPress builder walks through the 18 objections he hears about shipping client marketing sites with Astro, Claude and Cloudflare instead of a page builder.
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2 days ago
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educational
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
For client marketing websites, a static Astro site orchestrated by an AI agent replaces the page builder, the plugins and the database, and most objections to it come from misreading the word static.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A freelancer or agency owner who builds client sites in WordPress, Elementor or Wix and keeps hearing about building them with Claude Code instead.
A web designer who is comfortable visually but nervous about leaving a page builder because you never learned to read code.
Someone who watched an AI website build demo and walked away with questions about SEO plugins, client editing, backups or security.
A small business owner deciding whether an AI-built static site is a safe thing to pay a freelancer for.
SKIP IF…
You need user accounts, logins or a membership area. That is a web app and is explicitly out of scope here.
You run physical-product ecommerce. The video draws the line there and points you to Shopify or WooCommerce.
You want a step-by-step build tutorial. This is a Q&A on the reasoning, and the build itself lives in a separate video.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Static means every page is built once ahead of time instead of being assembled from a database on each visit, and that is the most misunderstood word in web work right now. A static site can still pull from APIs, rebuild on a schedule, take form submissions through a small serverless function and embed Stripe or Calendly checkouts. The work WordPress plugins did (SEO tags, schema, sitemaps, caching, custom post types) becomes plain code in Astro that an AI agent writes directly. Security risk shrinks to your accounts, a failed build never takes the live site down, and the files live in three places. The real limits are logins and physical-product stores, which belong to web apps and ecommerce platforms.
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Background in WordPress, the pivot to agentic building, and the setup as a follow-up to the tech-stack video.
01:12 – 01:46
02 · Where these questions come from
Questions come from WordPress users, other page-builder users and people who haven't built with AI yet.
01:46 – 03:09
03 · Marketing website vs static, defined
A marketing website is what the site is for; static is how it's built. Forms yes, accounts and logins no.
03:09 – 04:19
04 · What about a page builder?
Astro and Claude are the builder. What ships is real HTML, CSS and JavaScript, nothing locked to a plugin.
04:19 – 06:39
05 · Do you really feel in control without one?
More control, not less: every file is readable by the agent, every change is versioned in GitHub, and a hero redesign takes 30 minutes.
06:39 – 08:10
06 · How do you know the code is any good?
He doesn't read it. He checks outcomes: load speed, form delivery, SEO correctness, and a build that rejects malformed content.
08:10 – 09:54
07 · Isn't static too limited?
Static is about when the page is assembled. It still pulls from APIs and rebuilds on a schedule; the only loss is a different page per visitor.
09:54 – 11:02
08 · Bookings, payments, and logins
Forms run through a Cloudflare function to Postmark, Bento or a webhook. Bookings and payments are an embed or a small function. Logins mean a web app.
11:02 – 11:50
09 · Can you sell products on it?
Digital products yes, via styled Stripe Checkout or embeds. Physical-product ecommerce is a different blueprint.
11:50 – 13:41
10 · How do you edit it?
The same way it's built: open the project, describe the change to Claude Code in VS Code, it ships. A caveat that the upfront setup took months.
13:41 – 16:15
11 · Can a client edit it themselves?
Yes, by bolting on a headless CMS, but that's another system to log into, maintain and pay for. The test is how often the client actually edits.
16:15 – 18:02
12 · Custom post types, fields, and taxonomies
Each WordPress concept maps to Astro: collections, typed schemas, fields and slug references, all stored as Markdown.
18:02 – 19:18
13 · Does filtering and search still work?
Better than before: the content is already in memory at build, so filtering is an array operation instead of a database query.
19:18 – 21:17
14 · Don't you need Yoast or Rank Math?
Those plugins wrote meta tags through a settings UI. The agent writes the tags, schema and sitemaps directly as code.
21:17 – 22:18
15 · Will it actually rank?
Fast pages and valid schema are the baseline; content and proof decide rankings. One of his case studies outranked the client's own company name.
22:18 – 23:27
16 · What about security?
No server, database, login or plugins to attack. The risk moves to the accounts: GitHub, Cloudflare and the domain.
23:27 – 25:04
17 · What about updates?
No plugin ecosystem to keep patched. Dependencies move when he moves, and a failed build never takes the live site down.
25:04 – 27:50
18 · What about backups?
Three copies: local machine, GitHub and a weekly Backblaze B2 job that includes uncommitted work. Large media on R2 needs its own backup.
27:50 – 28:35
19 · What about caching?
Caching solves per-visitor rebuilding, which static sites don't do. Pre-built pages are served from Cloudflare's edge.
28:35 – 30:03
20 · What happens if I'm gone?
A standard Astro project in a git repo with docs inside it can be picked up by another developer or explained by any LLM.
30:03 – 31:06
21 · Want help with this?
Links to the free blueprint, done-for-you services and the paid community.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Static describes when a page is assembled, not whether its content can change.
A static site can pull live data from an API, so a price or a seats-left counter updates without anyone editing the page.
Every SEO plugin was a settings panel that wrote code you couldn't write yourself; an agent writes that code directly.
Technical SEO is only the baseline; content and proof decide whether a page actually ranks.
A static site has almost nothing to attack: no server, no database, no login and no plugins.
On a static stack the security risk moves from the server to your GitHub, Cloudflare and domain registrar accounts.
A failed build never takes the live site down, because the previous deploy keeps serving until the new one succeeds.
Git is version control, not a backup; a real backup also catches the uncommitted work sitting on your machine.
Caching exists to stop a CMS rebuilding every page for every visitor, a problem a pre-built site never has.
Filtering 92 items on a static page is an array operation in memory, not a database query.
In Astro a custom post type is a content collection, a custom field is a typed schema and a relationship is a reference by slug.
Most clients touch their website once or twice a year, so adding a CMS for them often buys a login nobody uses.
Website builders have been conditioned to read every line of code while people now ship whole SaaS apps agentically without doing so.
Judge agent-written code on a marketing site by outcomes: it loads fast, the forms submit and the SEO tags are correct.
If the developer disappears, a standard Astro project in a git repo can be picked up by anyone, or explained by any LLM.
Takeaway
Static sites lose almost nothing marketing sites need.
WHAT TO LEARN
Once you separate what a site is for from how it's built, every WordPress plugin job turns out to be code an agent can write, and the real limits are logins and physical stores.
03Marketing website vs static, defined
A marketing website describes the job: telling people who you are and how to reach you, with forms but no user accounts.
Static describes the build model: each page is generated once ahead of time, while the content itself can still change anytime.
04What about a page builder?
Without a page builder, what ships is real HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so nothing depends on a plugin that can stop being maintained.
Astro plus an AI agent fills the builder role; you describe the change in plain language instead of clicking through a visual editor.
05Do you really feel in control without one?
Control comes from readable files and versioned changes, not a visual interface; the agent can read every file because there is no proprietary layer.
Working in parallel matters: describing two changes to an agent at once lets a mobile and desktop hero redesign land in about 30 minutes.
06How do you know the code is any good?
For a marketing site, judge agent-written code on outcomes: page speed, forms that actually submit and technically correct SEO tags.
Let the build enforce a content schema so malformed entries fail before deploy rather than reaching the live site.
07Isn't static too limited?
A static site can pull from APIs at build time, so prices, testimonials or seats-left counters update without manual edits.
Scheduled or automated rebuilds keep static pages current; the one real trade-off is you can't render a different page per visitor.
08Bookings, payments, and logins
Forms need nothing extra: a small serverless function can route submissions to an email service, a marketing tool and a webhook at once.
If users need to log in, you are building a web app, which is a different architecture from a marketing site.
09Can you sell products on it?
Digital products sell fine through a styled Stripe Checkout or Calendly embed that calls the outside service from the page.
Physical-product ecommerce belongs on a dedicated platform like Shopify or WooCommerce rather than a hand-built static site.
10How do you edit it?
Edits happen the same way as the build: open the project, describe the change to the agent and let it commit and deploy.
The speed comes from months of upfront setup and conventions, so expect a learning investment rather than instant results.
11Can a client edit it themselves?
Clients can edit through a headless CMS such as Sanity, Tina or headless WordPress layered onto the static site.
Every CMS is another login to maintain and possibly pay for, so check how often the client really edits before adding one.
12Custom post types, fields, and taxonomies
A WordPress post type maps to an Astro content collection, and custom fields map to a typed schema the build checks.
Taxonomies become plain fields and relationships become references by slug, all stored in readable Markdown front matter.
13Does filtering and search still work?
Because the content is already loaded when the site builds, filtering and faceted search are array operations, not database queries.
Even a 92-item tools page can sort and filter instantly with no database behind it.
14Don't you need Yoast or Rank Math?
SEO plugins like Yoast mostly wrote title tags, descriptions and Open Graph tags through a settings UI; an agent can write those tags directly.
Schema markup for organization, person, breadcrumbs and case studies can be generated per page as code, so it can't half-break in a UI.
15Will it actually rank?
Fast pages, clean markup and valid schema are only the technical baseline every competitor should already meet.
Rankings are decided by content and proof such as case studies and testimonials, not by which SEO plugin you configure.
16What about security?
With no server, database, login or plugins, a static site leaves almost nothing exposed for attackers to target.
Security risk shifts to your accounts, so lock down GitHub, Cloudflare and the domain registrar with strong authentication.
17What about updates?
There is no plugin ecosystem to patch; framework dependencies update when you choose to rebuild.
A failed build only fails the deployment; the previous version keeps serving, so a bad update never takes the site offline.
18What about backups?
Git is version control, not a backup; keep a scheduled offsite copy that includes uncommitted work on your machine.
Large media in object storage like Cloudflare R2 sits outside the repo, so it needs its own separate backup destination.
19What about caching?
Caching exists to stop a CMS rebuilding pages for every visitor, a problem pre-built static pages don't have.
Pre-built files served from a CDN's edge are already close to the visitor, which is where static speed comes from.
20What happens if I'm gone?
A standard Astro project in a git repo is easy for another developer to pick up if the original builder disappears.
Keep documentation inside the repo so any LLM can explain the project to whoever inherits it.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Static site
A website whose pages are generated once at build time and served as ready-made files, instead of being assembled from a database each time a visitor loads them.
Astro
A JavaScript web framework built for content sites. It compiles Markdown and components into plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript at build time.
Content collection
Astro's way of grouping Markdown or data files of one type, such as blog posts or case studies, with a schema that defines which fields each entry needs.
Front matter
A block of structured fields at the top of a Markdown file, such as title, date or category, that the site build reads to sort and display the content.
Headless CMS
A content editor that stores and serves content through an API but doesn't render the website, so a separate front end like Astro pulls the content and displays it.
Serverless function
A small piece of code that runs on a provider's infrastructure only when triggered, such as on a form submission, without you managing a server.
CDN edge
The network of servers a content delivery network runs around the world. Files are served from the location nearest the visitor, which makes pages load faster.
Cloudflare R2
Cloudflare's object storage service for large files such as videos and images, used here to hold media that doesn't belong in the code repository.
Backblaze B2
A low-cost cloud storage service often used as an offsite backup destination for files and folders.
Schema markup
Structured data added to a page's code that tells search engines what the page describes, such as an organization, a person, breadcrumbs or a video.
“There's almost nothing to attack. There's no server, there's no database, there's no login, there's no plugins.”
rhythmic list answering a common fear→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
05:25
“They've been conditioned to think that they need to understand every single line of code in the website game.”
names a mindset the audience recognizes→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
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Hey there, so I've been building websites since way back in 2018. A lot of that time was spent in WordPress and other page builders, potentially like yourself. But I don't know if you noticed, the world is changing very rapidly.
People are building stuff with AI agentically now. And I have had to pivot my business to, you know, literally care for and serve the clients that I serve in different ways. One of the common themes that I see in this industry now is what is everyone doing?
How are you building with AI? Well, yesterday on this channel, I released a video about how I'm building exactly. I go through my entire tech stack.
I'll leave a link below. You can go check that out on whatever platform you're watching on. But in this video, it's going to be kind of part two to that video, and this is going to be all the questions that you have probably from that video.
There's a lot of questions and they're never ending. So I just kind of want to go through all that with you because I have amassed a large list here. And yeah, so we're just going to go through that.
So specifically, we're talking about static marketing websites. I'll define that in a second. But this is largely some things you might not know about static, some things you might not know about how marketing sites work.
And these are things that I've learned over the last 12 months. This is how I do it. It's not necessarily gospel, but it's working for me.
I'm going to tell you about it. All right, so before we start, where these come from, like I said, some people building on WordPress that I've had because I've had a lot of content and a lot of time in that space, people building on other builders, and then also people who have never built with AI. I've gotten all of these questions on social and everything else.
Again, I came from WordPress, so a lot of these are kind of framed with that in mind. But honestly, it's just where I came from. But regardless if you're working with Wix or anything else, there's probably a lot of similarities here in the questions.
So that's not really a prerequisite. And then again, like the last video is kind of how some of this started. So definitely go check that out.
Okay, so first two things. What are we talking about here specifically as far as all these answers go? I have some blueprints on my website.
This one's specifically for marketing website, but I have... web apps and e -commerce sites and stuff like that we're specifically talking about marketing websites here okay so like what these websites that we're talking about are for uh it's mainly business to business or business to consumer websites that you'd be building for like a plumber or a doctor or a lawyer or whatever.
Things that tell people about, you know, what the business is, who they are, how to reach them. Yes, they have forms. They don't have like things like account logins and all that sort of stuff that's outside the scope of this.
Again, other video for all that. And then static, I didn't really talk too much about static in that last video, but static is each page is built once ahead of time. So it's not for It's not built every single time for every visitor.
So if you're familiar with like a WordPress, like every single time you hit a site or a page, then it's literally pulling information in from a database. That's just not how static works. I'll get into that more technically slightly in this video, but there's just a ton of questions that revolve around this.
And that's like the biggest misunderstood word in all of the web space right now is the word static. So you have to understand that it doesn't necessarily mean what can be done on the website. It's just kind of how it's built, how it loads, things like that.
Um, but then the content, everything like that, you still have full reign over that. You can do all sorts of shit. Okay.
So that's the reality there, but there's more questions on that. Let's get into this. Cause there's a lot.
Okay. 18 of them. What about a page builder?
Okay. That's the first big question that I get. Okay.
What about a page builder? Well, I use Astro and Claude, as you saw in a little bit of the video yesterday or understanding that and other, other parts of my content and in modern builder society, my community, you can see me literally building that exactly the way that I build with all these things. I'm orchestrating constantly.
um you know what ships is like a real page it's not like a a mock -up or like builder markup or anything like that it's literally html css javascript uh all packaged and you know basically built with that job that javascript framework of astro to handle a lot of the content everything like that Um, there's nothing locked into a plugin.
There's nothing to be necessarily maintained in that regard. Certainly there's frameworks and certain dependencies on there, but there's way less than you would if you had that plus all of the other things that I, that I had, uh, in my previous stack. So specifically with the page builder, um, you know, there's, there isn't, there isn't one, there's not a visual interface.
Maybe that's a deal breaker for you, but honestly, you know, I was somebody that I thought, well, I, I, I don't really know too much about code. I, I did go for software development a while ago, while back in high school or in college, but I thought maybe I needed a page builder.
Turns out I'm fine without it. So, you know, it kind of parlays into this one. Do you feel, do you really feel in control without a builder?
To me, honestly, I feel more in control. I don't feel less because I can do so much more now via just orchestration and explaining what I want to do. You know, yesterday I just changed some, I just changed my hero design on mobile and on desktop.
So there are two different things. beautifully orchestrated took me you know maybe at the most 30 minutes um And, you know, that's like the whole process.
That's like kind of iterating on a little bit of an idea, playing around with it, and also, you know, doing other things literally while I'm doing it because I can orchestrate two different tasks at once. So I feel more in control. You know, every file is technically readable.
I'm not reading all the code by any means, but every file is readable so the agent can read it. There's no layers of abstraction that it has to sift through or proprietary stuff. It's just HTML, CSS, JavaScript largely, or any other language that I'm working in.
Um, so yeah, every, every change is version through GitHub. We'll talk more about that. And then, you know, the other thing is like this, this question kind of came from some other, some other sources here, but like, I, I hear people saying that they trust the agent to build like a SAS platform, right?
Like it's a lot of just real quick aside here. A lot of us web professionals, like we've been building websites and we've always yearned to build a little bit more, but we weren't software developers. So.
It was easy to build websites visually, but it wasn't easy to build apps and stuff visually. It got easier over time. But then AI came out.
Now we can just build whatever we want. So now you have people that are building SaaS. Right.
Just understand this for a second. You have people that are building SAS completely agentically, not understanding what's going on there, but they've been conditioned to think that they need to understand every single line of code in the, in the website game. And it's just like, it, it makes no sense.
Cause if you really break it down and think about it, like this, we're talking about marketing websites here. I'm not trying to belittle the craft. I'm just saying that it's not nearly as complex as like a web app situation, people logging in authentication, like all this stuff.
Right. So it's just, it's, I think a lot of it is just kind of mental things. So I'm trying to.
break down some of those things here. And if you don't agree with it, then you don't agree with it. But this is the life that I live now and I'm enjoying my life.
So a marketing site is, you know, in this case is, you know, just the easy case is kind of the point there. But I just care that it works. It makes my clients money.
So that's kind of the main thing there. I do feel much more in control without the builder. All right.
So the next one here is how do you know that the agent, how do you know what the code, like the code that the agent wrote is any good? Well, I'm going to be honest.
I'm not reading the code. So I don't really know. If you want that answer, you can roll with that.
You can clip that if you want. But here's how I think about this. These are marketing websites.
Does it load fast? Do the forms go through? Any functionality like that work?
Is the SEO technically accurate and everything's been set up there? And then the build catches certain stuff. I think still there's probably a section of people that think that when you build with AI, you're getting a lot of errors.
That doesn't happen barely at all to me. It's not like it doesn't know how to code. It knows how to code.
Is it the best code possible? Who knows? It's honestly becoming a little bit of a...
rhetorical question at this point in a way. What does that even mean? If you asked two developers before AI, that would have been an incredibly subjective answer to begin with, and now we're talking about something that has the sum aggregate of all the code that's been indexed, right?
So I'm not even going to comment on that. I don't even really care about that question. I'll concede whatever the hell you want to answer that question.
I'll just be over here building sites that load fast, forms go through, the SEO is right, client's very happy with it, it looks great, whatever, right? And I built it in a quarter of the time. So that's totally fine.
But ultimately, I don't know. I don't know if it's any good. I just know that it works.
So that's good enough for me. If that's not a great enough answer for you, I understand. But that's the answer to that one.
Is static too limited? So this one comes up a lot. So static is when the pages assemble, not whether it can change or stuff.
So static is the worst word possible. I'm sure it has some sort of like language. um barriers as well there but the word static you know in in the sense of english as i understood it is like it doesn't move it doesn't do anything it's literally the same constantly terrible terrible misnomer okay that's not what that means it's not it doesn't it doesn't uh a static website does not mean what it says in that in that regard uh it can pull from apis it can you know it can rebuild on a schedule you can you can do whatever like i mean if you look at my website there's information that's coming in from an API, like a testimonials API that I created.
There are things that, um, you know, with the modern motor society, as an example, I have a spot in there where it says right now, I think it says seven spots left at $49, uh, before it goes up to $59, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Um, but like that type of thing, that's not me changing that. That is literally coming from the API and just getting, you know, dropped in there.
Right. So these types of things, and it can be, when you need to rebuild, we'll talk a little bit more about that, and I talked about that yesterday as well. You can kind of see the whole process over there.
But when it needs to rebuild and everything, that can all be scheduled, that can all be automated.
The whole point is that it's not, the point I want to make on this one, because there's other questions that answer this, is it's not limited in the sense of what you can do. It's actually probably way less limited because now you can just orchestrate solutions. And you don't have to go through, again, different plugins or different things like that that you may have had to sift through before.
So yeah, the short answer is it's not too limited. You can do all sorts of shit. Okay, what about bookings, payments, or logins?
So forms, there's nothing extra. I described that yesterday. It's largely on my stack.
It's Cloudflare with a little serverless function that runs when the thing submits, and you just say, okay, hey, we want this to go through Postmark for the email delivery. We want this to go to shoot over to Bento to drop stuff in our marketing, and we want this to go to some sort of other thing to drop into our company portal like via Webhook or some sort of other something.
I mean, you can do all that. That's not a problem at all. bookings and payments so again same type of thing either like an embed or like a small function or what have you um you know largely you're going to probably end up doing like digital payments and stuff like that more than e -commerce again like i said anything physical like that is kind of like i would say outside the scope of like what these marketing sites are which are the vast majority of the internet and then logins like that's where again the line is drawn like if you if you want people i don't i don't mean uh admin login by the way we'll talk about that in a second uh but i mean Like if you want users to be logging into your website, I would call that more of a web app.
I would talk about that. You can look at my other blueprint. I will make a video on how I build web apps soon here, but that's outside the scope of this.
So yeah, that's kind of the answer to that one. Can you sell products on it? Obviously, yeah.
I mean, digital products, yes. Like you can sell Stripe. You can do like Calendly embeds or you can do like anything like that.
You can do Stripe checkout. Like it's literally just, it would be like a styled. embed or again like you could always link out to these different things but if you wanted it all put together um yeah i mean it's just basically embedded javascript um and then that that function that like embed or that piece of the website is just calling out to whatever service that is right that i wouldn't call this like all in one e -commerce in that way, right?
That would be like a Shopify, or maybe if you went back to WordPress, that would be like a WooCommerce. Not what we're building here, or a web app if you want custom. That's not what we're building here.
But yeah, you could absolutely do that. Again, physical products, that's really where I draw the line on e -commerce. So that's its own blueprint entirely.
Next one here, how do you edit? How do you edit it? Well, that's a great question.
The same way I build it. I talked about it yesterday, did a demo for you there. I orchestrate it directly in...
side of in my case vs code and the cloud code extension i'm just talking to it i'm just saying hey yesterday when i changed my my uh information like i have tools on my website you go check it out tools page uh yesterday in that video i did a live demo where i said hey i want to add i think it was hyperframes to it and i just said hey i want to add hyperframes go out and get the logos here's my blurb that i want to put in there do to do and it did it so i don't click anything i don't type anything i just express what i want to happen and then i do it and then it works like that Now, I always try to be like non -hype about this.
It is not like this necessarily. You have to give a little bit of a shit as to how you set things up. All these things that I'm telling you and everything I went through yesterday, like that was months of understanding and I'm trying to distill it for you.
But I'm saying it's easier and the work up front is worth it because you get so much. more efficiency later. I'm not saying that you're just going to like jump in there and just know exactly what to do in a sense.
Like I'm not saying it's just like, I mean, largely you can build websites like that. Obviously we've all been gotten marketed for that, but that's not what I subscribe to. I'm not trying to make hype content here.
Oh, we can make $10 ,000 websites in three seconds. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that I can, you can get all of the benefits of that, but also still get a great product and have a really solid foundation to continue to build websites for clients on.
That's what I'm saying. Okay. Aside, sorry, open the project, describe the change, it ships essentially exactly like what I said.
Those are no interface. You could, we'll talk about it, but I don't, it's not really something that I, not really something that I need as far as UI. I'm actually a pretty big anti -UI guy as far as clicking around and playing around.
We can talk about that in other videos. Okay, so can a client edit it themselves? This is a great question, all right?
It's a loaded question. It's a great question, though. The answer is yes, they can.
They can do it a bunch of different ways. You could set them up to do it the exact same way as you. Probably wouldn't recommend that.
I haven't really tried that yet. I do think there's a future in agentic edits like that, but it would have to be quite siloed. and like guardrailed because you wouldn't want them to be able to mess it up.
But I do absolutely think that what I did yesterday in that video, like add a new tool or add a new blog post or whatever, I do think that could be agentically orchestrated via a client. It's just like you gotta be a little bit careful with that. So that's one thing.
But you could absolutely pop a CMS onto the back of the stack that I use, okay? The Astro, Cloudflare, et cetera stack. You could do Headless WordPress.
I've done Headless WordPress. I've done Sanity. Probably never do either of those again.
But I've done those. Story for another video. I have also done Tina CMS.
I've tried that one. I've looked into a couple other ones. I've done like extensive research.
Spoiler, I'm probably gonna end up making my own just because everybody's doing it. And I have specific requirements that I feel like I might make a lightweight one for my clients and maybe I'll show you. So that's just topic for another video.
But anyway, the point is that you could do it, okay? I'm not saying you should do that, all right? You should just, you should take a look at other CMSs, type in like headless CMSs or whatever with Astro and there's.
You're probably gonna get marketed for 50 of them, but you can, okay? Your clients can edit the stuff, right? It's not a big deal.
Now, is it the same type of thing? Not necessarily all the time, right? because they might be able to edit some content, but they might not be able to edit exactly in a visual builder, but everybody's making a visual builder too.
So if that's something you really want, you could still do it over here, okay? That's just my point is, I don't think it's necessary. This is more of a business question.
I don't think 80 % of people actually need to be doing this. They're just like kind of making this up that their clients think that they need to be editing themselves and their clients actually never log in or anything like that. So that's just...
slightly story for a different time but i don't think that's exactly the case but again the trade here a couple other points um it's another system log log into it's another thing to keep current and potentially pay for because some of these do cost money not all of them but some of them do um and then the test um is like frequency like i said if if they're not logging in then you probably shouldn't need it anyway so that's more of like you just not going by you know just going with the flow you should probably actually like see if they need it um because like i said they don't really touch it like all the time at least in my case my clients don't So if you need it, we could talk more about that.
Let me know what your things are and I'll make more videos. And we could talk about it in Modern Builder Society. All right, the next one.
What about custom post types, fields, taxonomies, relationships, filters, and facets? All the cool stuff that I actually loved the most when I was building WordPress websites? Yes.
answer is yes uh post type is a content collection custom fields is a type schema so missing fields if there's missing fields and stuff like that you can set it to be strict so it uh it fails so like you can be like even more strict with that i understand i don't even have that turned on because it doesn't really make those types of mistakes i set up the schema how i want and i say hey put the in where it needs to go and it just kind of works um but you know that's the only way that you might have like a little bit of issues there if you're if it's adding that information into the markdown for like astro for instance uh you know There might be some issues there, but very rarely, if ever, because it just understands it because it's all patterns.
And then a taxonomy is just a field and a relationship is just like a reference via slug. I can't remember if there's other questions about this on there, but largely just to kind of wrap this is Astro is just like WordPress. I actually made when I, months and months ago, go back in the channel and look for Astro and WordPress.
I go through and I kind of like do a comparison because I'm like working in Cloud and trying to learn like live. It's a video though, but I'm trying to learn live. And I am like trying to see the patterns or the similarities.
And it was one of the greatest exercises ever because I realized that all of this stuff that normally takes place in the database in like a CMS or like a WordPress or whatever is literally just in Markdown files. And it would actually be so easy. I'm not going to say it'd be so easy to write, but like, you can just look at it and make total sense of it.
Cause it's just in like basically a markdown files, like a formatted text doc. And it just has some, you know, formatting in it that just then drives the build essentially. Right.
We're not going to get into the whole front matter and all these other technical things right now. But the point is that that, that is, that is ultimately this oversimplified version of how that works. So it's pretty cool.
Um, all right. So the next one is so filtering and fascinating search still work. Like you can still do it.
Yeah. You can do that. It's actually even better.
Okay. Because it's not like the simplified version of this is that when you go in like a WordPress or something, or you're trying to query from a, from a database, like a CMS with a database, you're, you have to go get that data and query it. Now, some cases this isn't going to work, but you could still do this from an API or whatever.
But in, in, in a situation where like your client has, you know, maybe like, like 40 blog posts or something. Right. then, and you're searching that it's way faster.
It's like instant to search based off of the stuff that's already in the, like the file system, essentially that has been created rather than doing a query to get it out of the database. Right. Um, so just, it's, everything's just already in like the memory essentially, like as the site builds, because there is no, we'll talk about another and other questions here.
I'm getting ahead of myself, but like, it's just an array operation, right? It's not like an actual database query, right? Like my thing, my tools page, I have like 92 items.
It just sorts it without a database because it doesn't have to do that every single time. Like it's just, it's already, it's hard to explain. It's already just built like that.
Like it's, it's just built. Everything's already there. You're just, you're kind of filtering an array, which is already kind of like their standard rather than going to grab that data from a database every single time.
Okay. Next one. What about SEO?
Don't you need like Yoast or Rank Math or anything like that? Well, those plugins mostly write, you know, like the tags and like the heads and the title tags and descriptions, open graph, all that sort of stuff. I slash Claude writes those tags directly.
There's nothing really to configure. Those products are great because when I was in WordPress, I used them because I wanted a UI to manage all that sort of stuff. I don't want...
Like I've very little, I want very little UIs now. I'm very little like configurable settings panels and stuff like that. The amount of time that I've wasted inside of settings panels is just nightmarish.
Like, cause I'm the type of person I want to understand where everything's at. And I don't need that anymore. Like, I don't, I don't care.
I want to do the things that I need to do. And I know that all that could be done with code. And the reason we had those, those types of panels, those types of plugins is because we couldn't orchestrate.
the work in code because we would have had to know how to do it. So it was abstracted into panels and now we just don't need that. I mean, the one thing I want you to understand is that the things that that was doing was just basically configuring code.
There wasn't special stuff there necessarily. Maybe there was some, I'm not going to belittle these products. Maybe there was some special stuff there, but largely it's setting up the SEO.
Astro, as I mentioned yesterday, has like little already predefined, like kind of not plugins, but little module things or whatever that kind of do all that sort of stuff, generate sitemaps, et cetera. like an external plugin or anything all you need is to like understand how to orchestrate seo like you would be better off just understanding like the deep the deep understanding of seo and then telling your clinker to do that in astro and configure it and then you don't need like a plug -in or any sort of like ui or anything like that to make that happen it just that's just how it works Okay.
So schema markup, same type of thing, generator for every page, organization, person, breadcrumbs, case studies, all that sort of stuff. It's just code guys. Same thing.
It's just code. It's not a plugin setting. You can't like half break because like the UI is broken or whatever.
And there's like another connection there that needs to happen when you're like clicking the button and then press and save. Like, it's not like that. It's just code.
You just, you just tell it to do it. It's just code. Okay.
Just code. Um, uh, will it actually rank? Okay.
There's a loaded question. The answer is. Like, yeah, it'll rank if you give it good content, right?
This is like a client question right here, okay? So spare me. It's like fast pages, clean markup, correct tags, valid schema, all that sort of stuff.
Everything that you, again, orchestrate and you take best practice on technical SEO, you could have done that before, right? That was the bar, right? That those plugins told you, oh, it'll have that sort of stuff.
But we all know if we're true with ourselves, if we're honest, content proof. It has nothing to do with configuration. I mean, configuration is important.
I'm not gonna lie. You need the technical configuration, but that's like the baseline. You need to actually be able to rank based off of the content you're putting on the site, the proof that you have, testimonials, all that other sort of stuff.
It'll rank though, okay? Funny story, real quick, my websites rank for other people's. I was actually told to take one of my case studies down because it was showing up too high in the search when people search for their company.
So yeah, still salty about that. That's ridiculous. Anyway, next one.
What about security? There's almost nothing to attack. There's no server running, which is confusing, but I'll explain.
There's no server. There's no database. There's no login.
There's no plugins, okay? It's just all in files. The pages are just files.
It's in GitHub. It's up on... Cloudflare pages, and then it just gets served via the CDN.
I think there's another question about that, so I'll keep it short for now. But it's just on the CDN. It's just out there.
It's out on the network, on the edge of the network, and when people connect to your website via ultimately Cloudflare DNS and everything like that, it just hits the edge of that, and it doesn't have to pull any other data because all data is sitting right there. It's just how it works. I didn't make it up.
It's just how it works. The risk, the risk though, there is risk. Okay.
Like everything, the risk, it's the same type of risk that you would have in any other system is just like your accounts, right? GitHub, Cloudflare, the domain, potential like, you know, bugs or anything like that, or just like Cloudflare going down, which everyone's screwed. And then, or like GitHub or something like that happening there.
So you should have backups, you should have all these things, right? But that's, that's a, it's a different type of security risk. What about updates?
There's no plugin ecosystem. You know, there's, there's no, there are new versions of like, you know, dependencies, frameworks and things like that, but those can just get auto updated every single time that you, um, that you, that you kind of build and add more dependencies. I'm not going to say there isn't, there isn't going to be bugs.
Okay. There's, there's probably going to be bugs. Yeah.
I mean, I've had different things happen. You don't actually though, real quick on this. I've actually had more bugs with like software.
I've had more Chrome bugs, Chrome, uh, based bugs than I have with other things. So for instance, had an issue where for some reason on my, on my one machine, it might've even been like specific to my machine.
I don't know, but I've had bugs where like the, the hover of buttons just stopped working for some reason, but it worked on other things. So that actually might've been a specific machine like version of like a Chrome or whatever, but largely is this too simplified, but If you are closer to like the standard of stuff, like again, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Astro, very highly utilized.
If you're closer to the standard of things, I just think that generally you're going to have less problems because you're using the stuff that is mostly already compatible with so many different things. It's like that website that I can't remember the name of is like, is it supported or whatever? When you start using extra stuff that isn't supported by all the browsers and everything like that, you can expect to have more problems.
Kind of similar. Maybe it's not a perfect example, but it's the one that I thought of right off the top of my head. But, you know, again, dependencies, you know, move when I move.
A failed build never takes down the entire live site just because, like, it still has the old copy in there, right? It just says, oh, your deployment failed for whatever reason, and then you just rectify that, and then you move on. So that's that.
Backups still important, okay? Not going to lie. Backups are still important.
Um, sometimes people call GitHub like a backup. I wouldn't really classify it as that. I don't really know if people do, but, um, I have, you know, there's three copies of my, of my data.
There's three copies of the website. It's different than thinking in WordPress because in WordPress used to kind of think of it as like, this is the WordPress installation on this server. I don't think of it like that anymore because that was like very monolithic and it was just like all in one spot.
Um, I think of. I literally say, hey, I want to build a new website. It spins up a folder on my machine that becomes like the Git repo, essentially.
Like there's, you know, there's Git like commits basically in that like locally. And then there's also that gets pushed up to GitHub. So it's on my machine.
It's on GitHub. It gets deployed to Cloudflare, but you can't really get anything back from that. That's just where it gets deployed to.
So the files are in those two places. And then it's also every Sunday, I have an automation with my AIOS that you should go watch those videos for too, because that's what powers all this shit. It gets committed, like even uncommitted work, it's backed up to B2, Backblaze.
that's where all the files are. So like, I'm not going to be losing these files. Okay.
They're in three different places. One's on machine and one's on, you know, GitHub, which is kind of, uh, piloting the deployments and then backblaze also just to be extra secure, which actually makes sense too, because like some of the uncommitted work obviously isn't on GitHub necessarily. So, you know, it's not like a, it's not like a one -to -one and all that it's covering the whole, the whole situation.
So yeah, different on backups there. Um, I will admit that I think I forgot a couple of things here. Um, no database uh that's you know pretty straightforward there's no database we talked about that there's nothing to back up there one last thing about backups that's not on the slide is you will have other situations like if you have videos or different things like that i don't even know if that's a question my bad i'll have to put it on the page after there is um like if you have big files where do you put those well typically i put them in cloudflare r2 i did talk about it yesterday so those files you do probably want to back up as well.
Like if you have a large hero video or just like some other sort of media that's on your person's website, your client's website or whatever, they're on R2, so they're kind of safe -ish, which would be, it's just like a Cloudflare object storage area. But you probably want to back those up to like a Backblaze as well or a Google Drive or something else, right?
I'm not going to be the guy that's going to sit, last thing on backups, I'm not going to be the guy that's going to sit a huge, you know. petabyte whatever drive thing on my on my desk i'm not going to do that uh but i i'm all in the cloud but i do want to be kind of like diversified it because like i don't want like my backblaze account to get compromised or screwed or whatever and then not have it anywhere so i'm trying to be as diverse as possible with uh where i keep this stuff so Uh, yeah.
Work in progress there as well. All right. What about caching?
We talked a little bit about this. The caching exists to like skip the rebuilding for every visitor. Okay.
So when you're on a WordPress or something like that, the reason you're caching is because every single time it hits the database, like when a person like goes to the website. So you're literally like trying to solve a problem that this automatically doesn't have essentially. Okay.
When you're talking about that. Over here, that doesn't happen because it doesn't have to do that. It's just built and it's just sitting there waiting for somebody to hit it rather than like somebody hitting, like knocking on the door and then you have to gather everything and then put it together basically, right?
So that's what caching serves to oversimplify, serves to solve. But like I said, everything's built already there and it's served from that CDN that's actually closer to the person that's actually seeing it, like via Cloudflare's network and everything like that. Okay, and then what happens if I'm gone?
Somebody else picks it up. Um, I do actually want to put more content about this cause I'm working on this right now. There is a serious like concern here in a way where, you know, it's, you have this in other situations where you would have to like log into hosting or log into like at least like the admin of like a WordPress site or any sort of other site.
But, um, there are some pieces around here that, you know, The client necessarily wouldn't be able to pick right up, but they also could easily go find literally a ton of other people because this is such like a large community. And now we have AI that could just like look at stuff and just understand exactly what's going on.
So somebody else would pick it up. Honestly, I haven't had this problem because I haven't died yet. Knock on wood.
But if I did have that, if something happened to me or whatever, I'm working on like continuity plans for these types of things because I don't want my clients to be shit out of luck. But ultimately. you know, a, you know, a standard Astro project and the GitHub repo is not like anything crazy, you know, it might be foreign to you right now, but it's not, it's absolutely not crazy.
And like any LLM would be able to understand exactly what's going on and like put people in the right way. Um, and I just think that that's kind of what the future is. Plus everything is documented in there.
So, you know, if they have any weird questions about like, Oh, how'd you do this? Like you point a clanker at it. Okay.
And you ask it what's going on. That's just the answer now. So that's it.
Um, everything written out, it's all in the blueprint. If you go to, uh, it'll be linked in the description. If you go to, uh, Um, the blueprints and the marketing website one there, there's some other ones that's free.
You can just look at it on the website. Um, there's some other blueprints that I'll talk about in future videos as well. Um, cause I enjoy putting this together and kind of like working through this with you guys.
Um, two things real quick. If you want this built with you built for you, if you're some sort of like a business owner and somehow you found this video, thanks for watching. If you want DFY done for you services, I do that.
I'm just a link slash work link in the description. Uh, or if you're somebody like me, a freelancer agency owner, want to build this for yourself. and for clients and all that sort of stuff.
And you want to build alongside people. Modern Builder Society is my community. I talk about this.
We have office hours in there. We have full builds, actual work of a little AI beginner's course in there as well. So yeah, that's pretty much it for me.
I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it was enlightening. A lot of questions.
If you have more, drop them in the comments. I'll make more videos on them. But yeah, my advice, go out there and give it a try.
Just give it a shot. Watch some of the other videos. Point your clanker out and say, hey, I want to build websites like this guy.
I don't know if it's right or not, but, you know, whatever. Give me your thoughts, Claude, or ChatGPD, or whatever you use. And just give it a shot.
Can't hurt. Just see what you can do. See if you like it more.
See if you like it less. That's all I got for you today. I appreciate you guys watching.
Thank you so much. I'll talk to you in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The title promises the full list of objections, and the opening delivers credibility before content: a builder since 2018 who spent years in WordPress and had to pivot. It's framed as part two of a build walkthrough, so the viewer arrives already skeptical and gets 18 numbered answers.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:46concept
Marketing website vs static
Marketing website: what it's for (tells people what you do, who you are, how to reach you; forms yes, accounts no)
Static: how it's built (each page built once ahead of time, content still changes whenever you want)
Two words that get conflated. One describes the job of the site, the other describes the build model. Most objections dissolve once they're separated.
Steal forexplaining a technical choice to a non-technical client
06:39list
Outcome checks for agent-written code
Does it load fast?
Do the forms go through?
Is the SEO right?
Does the build catch content that breaks its defined shape?
Instead of reviewing code line by line, judge a marketing site on the four outcomes the client actually pays for.
Steal fora QA checklist for any AI-built client site
16:15model
WordPress to Astro concept map
Post type = content collection
Custom fields = typed schema (missing field fails the build)
Taxonomy = a field
Relationship = reference by slug
Every structured-content feature a WordPress builder relies on has a one-to-one equivalent in Astro, stored in Markdown files instead of a database.
Steal formigrating a WordPress mental model to a static framework
25:04list
Three-copy backup
Local machine (git repo)
GitHub (drives deployments)
Backblaze B2 every Sunday, uncommitted work included
Git is version control, not a backup. A scheduled offsite copy catches what never got pushed, and large media on R2 needs its own copy.
Steal fora backup policy for client sites
13:41concept
Client-editing frequency test
Before adding a CMS, check how often the client actually edits. Most touch their site once or twice a year, so the CMS adds a login, maintenance and cost for little use.
Steal forscoping client site proposals
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
30:03product
“If you want DFY done for you services, I do that. Link slash work link in the description. Or if you're somebody like me, a freelancer agency owner, want to build this for yourself... Modern Builder Society is my community.”
A two-path closing slide (build it for you at mjs.link/work, build it alongside others at mjs.link/mbs), preceded by a pointer to the free blueprint. Soft and segmented by viewer type; there is also an earlier aside about community pricing (seven spots left at $49 before $59) dropped as an example of API-driven content.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A 19-minute walkthrough of a free Claude Code skill pack that finds local businesses ranked on page 2-3, scores them by closability, generates a PDF audit report, and drafts a personalized cold email from a single slash command.
A non-technical marketer live-demos two Claude Code SEO workflows — one that auto-publishes blog posts from YouTube videos, one that vibe-codes local service sites from scratch — and shows real revenue and real rankings.
An 18-minute walkthrough of eight specific library choices and prompting habits that turn generic AI output into sites that look professionally designed.
A 29-minute walkthrough of wiring a coding agent to a data pipeline, a data warehouse, and a marketing API gateway so it can write ads, pull cross-platform data, and ship blog posts on its own.
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