A few weeks ago, the NettSite website ran on WordPress. Today it doesn't. If you're reading this, you're looking at the result — a hand-built website with no database, no content management system, and no plugins to update. It loads in under 50 milliseconds anywhere in the world.

The old site took 1.4 seconds just to start responding. That's not a small difference. It's the difference between a visitor staying and a visitor leaving.

Here's what we did, why we did it, and — most interestingly — how AI made it practical.

What Was Wrong With WordPress

WordPress powers roughly 40% of the internet, and for good reason: it's flexible, well-supported, and most people can figure it out. But that popularity comes with costs that quietly compound over time.

The first is speed. Every time someone visits a WordPress site, the server has to do work: connect to a database, run PHP code, fetch settings, apply a theme, assemble a page, and finally send it to the visitor. On a typical shared hosting plan, that process takes over a second. Google measures this. Slow sites rank lower in search results.

The second is security. WordPress is a target precisely because it's everywhere. Its login page — always found at /wp-admin — is probed by automated bots thousands of times a day on any public installation. Plugins introduce vulnerabilities. Outdated installations get compromised. There's a reason the other section of this blog is about VPS security — we see this constantly.

The third is maintenance. WordPress requires updates. Plugins require updates. PHP requires updates. Theme files require updates. Miss one, and you're exposed. Keep up, and you're spending time on admin that generates no value for your business.

For a company that builds and maintains websites for clients, running our own site on a platform with these characteristics sent the wrong message.

What a Static Site Actually Means

The term "static site" sounds technical, but the idea is simple. Instead of a server assembling each page on demand, the pages are pre-built files — just text, stored on a server, waiting to be fetched. Think of it as the difference between a restaurant that cooks your order fresh and one that hands you a pre-made package from a shelf nearby. The package is ready instantly.

There's no database to hack. There's no login page to probe. There's no server-side code to exploit. The attack surface — the number of ways an attacker can get in — shrinks to almost nothing.

We deployed our static site on Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare's free hosting platform. Cloudflare operates one of the world's largest networks, with servers in over 300 cities. When a visitor loads our site, the file is served from whichever of those 300 locations is closest to them. That's why the response time drops from 1.4 seconds to under 50 milliseconds — the page isn't travelling across the world, it's already next door.

The Obvious Problem: Someone Has to Write the Code

A static site has no visual editor, no drag-and-drop page builder, no "add new post" button. The pages are written in HTML — the raw language of the web. For most businesses, that's a dealbreaker. For us, it's where things got interesting.

We rebuilt the site using Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant. Claude Code doesn't just answer questions about code — it reads files, makes changes, runs commands, and works through problems across a whole project. It's less like a chatbot and more like a developer you can direct in plain English.

The process looked like this: we described what the site needed to look like — the layout, the colours, the content, the pages — and Claude Code built it. When something didn't match the original design, we said so, and it fixed it. When the mobile layout needed work, we described what was wrong and it corrected the CSS. When an SEO audit flagged missing tags across all seven pages, it updated every file in a single session.

The entire site — five service pages, a blog, a contact form, responsive mobile layout, full SEO metadata, structured data for Google, security headers for Cloudflare — was built and refined over a few hours of conversation. A traditional development engagement for a project of this scope would take days and cost considerably more.

SEO Without a Plugin

One of WordPress's selling points is its ecosystem of SEO plugins — tools like Yoast or Rank Math that help you manage page titles, meta descriptions, and structured data. Without WordPress, we needed those handled differently.

We ran a full SEO audit against the old site and fed the results to Claude Code. It worked through the findings systematically: adding missing meta descriptions, fixing heading structures, adding Open Graph tags so pages display properly when shared on social media, adding Twitter Card tags, inserting JSON-LD structured data so Google can understand what each page is about, and correcting the language attribute to en-ZA across every page.

No plugin needed. The result is baked directly into the HTML, which means it loads with zero additional overhead.

The Real Trade-Off: Content Changes Require Code Changes

This is worth being honest about. On WordPress, you can log in from any browser, change a heading, update a price, or publish a blog post without touching a line of code. On a static site, you can't — at least, not in the traditional sense.

Want to update your phone number in the footer? That's an edit to a file. Want to publish a new blog post? That means creating an HTML file, writing the content in markup, adding it to the blog index, and updating the sitemap. Then pushing the changes to GitHub, where Cloudflare Pages picks them up and deploys automatically within about 30 seconds.

For a business owner without technical skills, that workflow is a barrier. You'd be dependent on a developer for every content update, however small. That's a legitimate concern.

How We Mitigate It

The answer, again, is Claude Code. Because the AI understands the entire site structure — the files, the CSS conventions, the template patterns — content changes become conversational. "Update the phone number in the footer" becomes a one-sentence instruction. "Add a blog post about X" becomes a brief conversation. The AI writes the HTML, makes the file, updates the index and sitemap, and commits everything to GitHub in a single session.

It's a different workflow from clicking inside a CMS, but for a technically-minded team it's actually faster — there's no logging in, no navigating menus, no waiting for a page to save. You describe the change, it's made, it's live.

For clients who genuinely need a self-service content editor, WordPress remains the right tool. But for businesses that primarily use their website as a presentation layer — where content changes are occasional rather than daily — the static approach offers real advantages in speed, security, and cost that are hard to ignore.

The Bottom Line

The NettSite website now loads faster, costs less to host, presents a smaller security target, and required no manual coding from us. The SEO groundwork that typically requires a plugin and ongoing attention is built into the HTML itself.

None of that would have been practical without AI-assisted development. The economics of hand-coding a static site only make sense when the marginal cost of each change — a new page, a design tweak, an SEO fix — is measured in minutes of conversation rather than hours of developer time.

That's a shift worth paying attention to, whether you're considering a new website for your business or wondering how technology is changing what's possible at reasonable cost.

Thinking about your own website?

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