22 Oct 25 
Three popular ways to build a marketing site, three very different performance ceilings. An honest comparison of Astro, Next.js, and WordPress for speed, and how to pick without regret.
Most marketing sites are slow because of a decision made at the very beginning, long before anyone looked at a PageSpeed score. The stack you choose sets a performance ceiling. You can optimise hard and get close to that ceiling, but you cannot easily beat it, which is why “we will make it fast later” so often fails: the ceiling was set too low on day one.
So before the caching plugins and the image compression, the higher-leverage question is which foundation you are building on. Here is an honest look at three common choices for a marketing site, from the perspective of a studio that ships one of them in production every week.
The Short Version
If raw speed on a content-driven marketing site is the priority, a modern static-first framework like Astro gives you the highest ceiling with the least fighting. Next.js is powerful and fast in capable hands, but it is a heavier tool built for applications, and using it for a brochure site means carrying weight you may not need. WordPress can be made fast, but you are usually optimising against the platform rather than with it, and the default path leads somewhere slow. None of these is “wrong.” They are suited to different jobs.
WordPress: Familiar, Flexible, and Heavy by Default
WordPress runs a huge share of the web for good reasons: it is familiar, endlessly extensible, and anyone can edit it. The performance problem is rarely WordPress itself and almost always what accumulates on top of it. A page builder here, a slider plugin there, a theme that loads its entire kitchen sink on every page, and three analytics scripts, and suddenly a simple marketing page is shipping enormous amounts of code to render a headline and a button.
You can absolutely make WordPress fast. It takes a lean theme, ruthless plugin discipline, a caching layer, and someone who treats every third-party script as a cost. But you are swimming upstream: the default direction of the platform, the plugins, and the themes is toward more weight, and holding the line requires constant vigilance. For a team without that discipline, WordPress speed decays quietly over time.
Next.js: Powerful, and More Than Many Sites Need
Next.js is a genuinely excellent framework, and in skilled hands it produces fast, capable sites. It shines when your marketing site is really a web application: heavy interactivity, authenticated areas, dynamic personalised content at scale. For that job it is a strong choice.
The catch for a pure marketing site is that Next.js ships a JavaScript framework to the browser to run your pages, and even with careful optimisation you are starting from a heavier baseline than a static-first tool. If your site is mostly content, headlines, images, a blog, a few forms, you may be paying an application-sized tax for a brochure-sized job. It can be fast. It just asks more of you to stay that way, and the failure mode is a bundle that grows until interactivity gets sluggish.
Astro: Built for Exactly This Job
Astro was designed around a simple idea that fits marketing sites perfectly: ship almost no JavaScript by default, and only send the interactive bits where they are actually needed. A content page renders to clean, light HTML, which is precisely what makes the largest element paint quickly and keeps the page feeling instant. When you do need interactivity, you add it surgically rather than paying for a whole framework on every page.
We run Astro in production for exactly this reason. For a content-driven marketing site, it gives the highest performance ceiling with the least ongoing fight, which means the speed you launch with is closer to the speed you keep. It is not the right tool for everything, a complex application still wants an application framework, but for the job most marketing sites actually are, it is hard to beat.
Speed Is Not the Only Trade-off
Performance is the lens of this post, but choosing a stack on speed alone is how teams end up regretting the decision anyway, because three other costs come attached.
The first is who edits the site. WordPress wins convenience: non-technical people can update content in a familiar interface without involving a developer. A static-first framework usually needs a content layer or a headless CMS bolted on to give editors that same comfort, and if you skip it, every copy change becomes a developer ticket. Decide up front who owns edits, because a fast site nobody can update is its own kind of slow.
The second is maintenance over time. WordPress carries a real security and update burden: plugins need patching, and an unattended install drifts toward vulnerable and bloated. A lean framework has less surface to maintain, but leans on developer skills your team may not keep in-house. Neither is free. They just send the bill to different departments.
The third is total cost, which is rarely what it looks like on day one. A cheap WordPress host plus a pile of premium plugins can quietly cost more than a modern framework on efficient hosting, once you count the plugin licences and the time spent keeping it fast. Price the whole life of the site, not the launch.
None of this reverses the speed picture. It just means the fastest stack on paper is the wrong pick if it fights the way your team actually works.
How to Choose Without Regret
Match the tool to the job, not to the trend. If your site is mostly content and speed is a priority, a static-first framework like Astro is the path of least resistance to a fast site that stays fast. If your marketing site is genuinely an application, Next.js earns its weight. If you need WordPress for editorial or organisational reasons, go in with eyes open and budget for the discipline it takes to keep it lean.
Whatever you pick, remember that the stack sets the ceiling but your habits set the reality. Even the fastest foundation gets slow if you bolt enough scripts onto it, which is why speed and conversion stay linked long after launch day. Choose the foundation deliberately, then protect it.
If you want help choosing the right foundation for your next build, or making the one you have as fast as it can be, that is a conversation away.