The WordPress alternative:
less technology, more website
Most small business websites run on a system built to run anything — a shop, a forum, a magazine, a social network. Yours needs to do about six things, extremely well, for the next ten years. So we build it out of the least technology that does the job.
Already have a site nobody will update? That is what our website maintenance is for.
A WordPress site is software, running all day, waiting for visitors
WordPress runs a huge share of the web and it earned that position: it can be made to do almost anything. The way it does it is by being a program. Someone opens one of your pages, and PHP wakes up, queries a database, and assembles that page through a theme and however many plugins are installed — every time, for every visitor.
That machinery is exactly why it is so flexible. It is also why it needs patching every few weeks, why a plugin you have never heard of can take the site down, and why there is a login page on the public internet with your business sitting behind it.
For a site whose job is to tell everyone who visits the same handful of things, that is a great many moving parts to own.
Yours is finished before anyone visits
We build your site in Astro and render it to plain HTML — the pages are made once, when we publish, rather than over and over on a server. Those files are then copied onto a global network, so whoever opens your site is served from a machine near them.
There is no database. No login page. No plugins. Nothing is executing when a visitor arrives: the page has already been written, and it is simply handed over.
It is a smaller idea than WordPress, and that is the entire point.
Nothing to hack. Nothing to update.
Nothing to hack
No login page, no database, no plugin with a vulnerability waiting in it. The ordinary ways a small business site gets taken over all need software running on a server to attack. There isn't any.
Nothing to update
No security notices, no plugin conflicts, no morning where the site looks wrong because something updated itself overnight. Nothing is installed, so nothing drifts.
Fast renders
Your pages aren't assembled when someone asks for them — they already exist. That is the difference between milliseconds and seconds, and it is one of the things Google measures when it decides where you rank.
Served from everywhere
Your site is copied to data centers around the world and served from whichever is nearest the visitor. Someone three states away gets it as quickly as someone in town.
Does only what it needs to
No comment system you will never switch on, no user accounts, no page builder with four hundred settings. Everything in your site is there because your site needs it.
Ages well
A site with no plugins and no database has nothing to fall out of date. Left alone for five years it is the same site, still fast, still up.
The same website, two ways to own it
| A typical WordPress site | Your Superhero site | |
|---|---|---|
| How a page is made | Assembled on every visit by PHP, from a database, through a theme and its plugins | Built once, when we publish, into a finished HTML file |
| Running on the server | PHP, a database, a theme, and however many plugins have accumulated | Nothing. Static files, handed over as they are |
| Security updates | Core, theme and every plugin, for as long as you own the site | None to apply |
| Ways in for an attacker | The login page, the database, and each plugin | No login, no database, no plugins |
| Where it is served from | Usually one server, in one region | A global network, from the location closest to the visitor |
| Making a change | Learn the admin yourself, or pay someone by the hour | Send a request in plain English; we build it and publish it |
| What it needs from you | Ongoing attention, forever | Nothing |
When WordPress is the right answer
None of this is a claim that WordPress is bad. It is a claim that most small businesses are running a great deal more of it than their website needs.
If you need a real shop with hundreds of products, a members area, bookings that take payment, or one specific plugin your industry runs on, then WordPress — or something like it — is the right tool, and we will tell you so rather than sell you the wrong thing. Those builds go to Superhero Labs, our custom development team atEcropolis.
And the honest trade on our side: there is no page builder, and you do not edit the site itself. To change a price or swap a photo you send us a request instead of doing it yourself. You do get a dashboard — events you publish yourself, your inquiries, your images and your paperwork — but it is deliberately not a CMS, and the website is ours to change rather than yours to maintain. For most people that is the appeal: it is the part they never wanted to own in the first place. If you would rather be hands-on in a CMS every week, we are not the right fit, and the fit check will say so before you pay us anything.
Wondering whether one particular plugin has an answer here? See what your site can do — forms, booking, reviews, calendars, galleries and the rest, with the plugin each one saves you buying named beside it.
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