WordPress to Hugo and Cloudflare: A Site AI Can Maintain

Since 2018, anto.online ran on WordPress. It did the job, but it also came with a job of its own: updating WordPress, updating plugins, updating the theme, keeping an eye on the database, and wondering whether this week’s plugin update would be the one that broke something or let someone in.

I’m a director at an enterprise software company and I’m busy 12 hours a day. I don’t have time to babysit a CMS. So I asked myself a simple question: if AI is going to help me run this site, what kind of site is AI actually good at running?

The answer wasn’t WordPress. This post explains what I moved to, how AI fits in, what I gained, and what I gave up.

The problem with WordPress (for me)

WordPress is brilliant software, and it powers a huge part of the web. But a WordPress site is a living application:

PHP code running on a server, every time someone visits
A database holding your posts, settings and users
Plugins and themes, each written by different people, each needing updates
An admin login at /wp-admin that bots try to break into all day, every day

Every one of those is something to patch, back up and worry about. In a world of constant security news, I wanted fewer moving parts, not more.

The idea: a site AI can work on

AI tools like Claude are very good at reading and editing text files. They’re much less useful when your content is locked inside a database and an admin panel that only a human can click through.

So the new anto.online is built from plain text:

Every post is a Markdown file
The design is a handful of templates and one stylesheet
Everything lives in a Git repository, with the full history of every change

That means I can say “update the pfSense guide for the latest version” or “add a privacy policy that covers AdSense”, and AI can make the change directly in the files. I review it, approve it, and it goes live.

The new setup

There are only three pieces, and two of them are free.

Hugo turns the Markdown files into a complete static website: plain HTML pages, no database, no PHP. It builds all 255 pages in about one second.
GitHub (a private repository) stores everything and keeps a record of every change.
Cloudflare hosts the site on its global network for free, and rebuilds it automatically whenever a change is merged.

The whole workflow looks like this:

I ask for a change
   → AI edits the files and opens a pull request
   → I review it (usually about 5 minutes)
   → I merge it
   → Cloudflare builds and publishes the site

There’s no server for me to log into, no software to update, and no database to back up.

What I gained

Nothing to patch

This was the big one. A static site is just files. There’s no WordPress core, no plugins and no PHP to keep up to date. Hugo only runs at build time, inside Cloudflare’s build system, and then the result is plain HTML.

A much smaller attack surface

No database means no database to breach. No admin login means nothing for bots to brute-force. The thing visitors reach is a set of read-only files on Cloudflare’s network, which is also built to absorb attacks.

That doesn’t make the site magically unhackable. My GitHub and Cloudflare accounts are now the keys to the kingdom, so they’re protected with strong passwords and two-factor authentication. But two well-secured accounts are a lot easier to look after than a whole application stack.

Speed

Static HTML served from a CDN is fast. After the move, GTmetrix gave the home page:

Grade A
94% performance and 93% structure
398ms Largest Contentful Paint, so the main content appears almost instantly
0.04 Cumulative Layout Shift, so the page barely jumps around while it loads

Most of the remaining load time comes from Google Analytics and the ads that help pay for the site, not from the site itself.

Free hosting

Cloudflare hosts static sites like this one on its free plan. No hosting bill, no server to size, no surprise traffic spikes to worry about.

History and easy rollback

Because everything is in Git, every change is recorded: what changed, when, and why. If something goes wrong, I can undo it in one click. That’s a level of safety WordPress never gave me without extra plugins.

How the migration went

I used Claude to do most of the heavy lifting, with me reviewing and approving each step. In numbers:

211 posts and pages converted from the WordPress export into Markdown
274 redirects set up, so old links and old category addresses still land on the right page and Google rankings carry over
Images trimmed from about 500 MB to 45 MB, by keeping only the files the posts actually use
A brand new design, warmer and more personal than the old theme

It wasn’t all smooth. At go-live, Cloudflare refused to attach anto.online to the new site because the old DNS records pointing at WordPress were still there. The error message said exactly that, so the fix was to delete the two old records and retry the deploy. A few minutes later the new site was live. WordPress stayed backed up the whole time, so rolling back was always an option.

Using AI safely (the bit that matters)

Letting AI work on your website sounds risky, so here’s how I keep it sensible:

AI proposes, I approve. Every change arrives as a pull request. Nothing reaches the live site until I merge it.
I read every change. It takes a few minutes, and I catch things. For example, I removed a line that claimed I personally test everything, because that isn’t true.
AI never gets my passwords. It works through GitHub with limited access. Things like DNS changes, AdSense settings and payments, I do myself.
I’m upfront about it. The site has a How this site works page that explains exactly how AI is used and how each guide was checked.

The trade-offs

A static site isn’t right for everyone. Here’s what I gave up:

No comments. If readers want to reach me, they can do it on LinkedIn.
No plugins. Anything dynamic, like a contact form or a newsletter sign-up, needs an outside service.
No point-and-click editor. You need to be comfortable with Git and Markdown, or have AI do that part for you.
Not for shops or membership sites. If you need logins, carts or user accounts, you still want a proper CMS or platform.

For a blog full of guides, none of those are deal-breakers. For an online store, they would be.

Should you do it?

A static site plus AI is a great fit if:

Your site is mostly articles, guides or documentation
You’re tired of updating WordPress and plugins
You’re comfortable reviewing changes, even if you don’t write the code yourself
You want something fast, cheap and low-maintenance

Stick with WordPress if you rely on lots of plugins, need user accounts or e-commerce, or have people who must edit content in a visual editor.

For me, the move has been a clear win. The site is faster, safer and free to host, and I spend my limited spare time writing instead of patching. If you’re thinking about doing the same and want to compare notes, say hello on LinkedIn.