We Stopped Optimizing WordPress and Wrote Something Better
Legal marketing spent twenty years building workarounds for a 2003 blogging tool. Why we replaced it with AstroPress, and what a site built for agents lets a law firm do.
Wolfe Services · · 6 min read
WordPress was released on May 27, 2003. It was built to publish a blog, and it did that well enough to end up under 40.1% of all websites, by W3Techs’ count on October 11, 2026. Most law firm websites are in that number.
We have built custom software for professional firms since 2008, and for a good part of that time we did what everyone in legal marketing does. We made WordPress faster. We made it safer. We made it do things it was never designed for. This note is about why we stopped.
A blog engine from the dial-up years
WordPress runs on what engineers call the LAMP stack: Linux, the Apache web server, the MySQL database, and the PHP language. The name was coined in 1998. The design is simple to describe. When someone asks for a page, PHP code runs, queries the database, assembles the HTML, and sends it back. It does that again for the next visitor.
For a personal blog in 2003, that was a sensible design. For a law firm with two thousand pages and a potential client on a phone in a parking lot, it means the page is being built at the moment the person is waiting for it.
WordPress deserves its success. It let people with no technical training publish to the web, and that changed publishing. Our argument is narrower: a design from that period is the wrong base for a firm whose website is how it meets most of its new clients.
Twenty years of workarounds
Look at what a well-run WordPress site carries today. Each item was added to compensate for something the base system does by default.
| What gets added | What it compensates for |
|---|---|
| Caching plugin | Pages are assembled on every request |
| Page builder | The theme system is hard to design in |
| SEO plugin | Structured data and search controls are not built in |
| Security plugin | The other plugins |
| Image optimizer | Modern image formats are not produced by default |
| CDN and managed hosting | Building pages on request takes a lot of server |
The security row is the one that should bother a law firm. Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025. Ninety-one percent were in plugins, and 46% had no patch available when they were disclosed. WordPress core accounted for six. The base is reasonably safe. The things you must add to make it competitive are where the exposure is.
An industry formed around maintaining this. Hosting, plugin licences, speed work, security monitoring, the monthly retainer for someone to keep it all updated. A lot of what gets sold to law firms as SEO is upkeep on the workarounds. Nobody selling that upkeep has much reason to ask whether the foundation should be replaced, and so for two decades few did.
The fix was to write something better
AstroPress is our answer. It is how we use Astro and Cloudflare to do the job WordPress was doing.
The central difference is when the work happens. An AstroPress site is built once, ahead of time, into finished pages. Those pages sit on Cloudflare’s network close to the visitor. There is no database to query when someone arrives and no plugin layer running on each request, which removes most of the table above. Speed, structured data and security are properties of how the site is built.
We have a before and after from a working New York firm. In 2025, its WordPress build scored 42 to 53 out of 100 on Lighthouse performance across six test regions. The rebuilt site scored 91 to 98 in the same regions. On September 2, 2026, Google’s PageSpeed Insights reported that the site passed Core Web Vitals on real-user data, with Lighthouse scores of 100 in all four categories. The full record lists what we could not verify, including the exact capture dates of the 2025 panels. Those scores describe the pages. They do not show how many clients the firm signed.
The admin screen is the part that aged worst
Here is the opinion we hold most strongly. The WordPress dashboard is no longer the right way to run a website.
That dashboard is a 2000s idea: a person logs in, clicks through menus, types into a box, and presses Publish. Every plugin adds its own settings screen. The state of the site ends up spread across a database and dozens of forms that only a human clicking through them can inspect.
We do not work that way now, and we doubt anyone will in five years. In AstroPress, the content is a set of plain files in a repository the firm owns, with a schema that says what every article must contain. That is a format software agents can read and write. An agent can read the firm’s entire library before drafting a word. It can find the three older articles a new one should link to, notice that two pages argue with each other, check a draft against its sources, and propose the change. A person reviews exactly what changed, line by line, before it goes live. The build refuses to publish a page that fails its checks.
The Field Notes you are reading are produced that way. We described the controls in an earlier note.
Agents can be pointed at WordPress too. But they would be operating a system designed around a person with a mouse, and their changes would land in a database where nobody can easily see what was altered or undo it.
What this allows
Because the site is software we wrote, it connects to the rest of the firm’s systems directly. An inquiry from the website is written to a permanent record and delivered into the firm’s intake inbox in Docket with its source attached. Chat intake, where the site asks the firm’s own intake questions in real time and hands off to a person, is in build now.
Clean, consistent pages are also what AI search tools read most easily. We think that will matter more each year, though we cannot yet measure how much.
And the firm owns all of it: the repository, the content, the deployment. If we disappeared, another competent team could run it.
What it does not solve
A faster platform does not make weak content good. An agent can produce a confident, wrong paragraph faster than any writer, which is why review stays with a person. Moving a large WordPress archive is real work, and a firm that wants its staff to edit pages in a visual editor every day will find a repository unfamiliar at first.
Questions for whoever runs your site
- How many plugins are installed, and what does each one compensate for?
- Do you pass Core Web Vitals on real-user data, on mobile, today?
- If a plugin author stops issuing updates, who finds out, and when?
- Can you see exactly what changed on the site last month, and reverse one change?
- If you left your agency tomorrow, what would you take with you?
If the answers come back as a list of things being managed, you are paying for upkeep on 2003. Get off the dead tech.