We Built an Agent That Publishes Our Website

WordPress was quietly wrecking our search visibility and burning engineering hours. Every plugin update felt like rolling dice, database queries slowed time-to-first-byte, and authoring marketing pages felt like wrestling a ten-year-old CMS monster.

So we dumped it. We rebuilt the Aviato website on Astro, static markdown, and Bitbucket, with a custom publishing agent handling the Git mechanics. The difference in search performance, hosting bills, and publishing speed was night and day.

Why Our WordPress Site Tanked SEO

Google makes no secret of ranking pages by Core Web Vitals. On WordPress, keeping those green was a losing battle.

Our audit told the painful story: slow server response times, bloated DOM trees caused by visual page builders, and dozens of render-blocking JavaScript files from plugins we barely used. Mobile performance scored in the low 40s. Search crawlers wasted crawl budget waiting on dynamic PHP threads, while heavy assets hurt our organic rankings.

Beyond search penalties, WordPress cost real money. We were paying $120 a month for managed PHP hosting, plus recurring plugin licenses, just to patch vulnerabilities and fight bot spam on wp-login.php.

The Astro Fix: Near-Perfect Scores and Pennies to Host

Moving to Astro solved the problem at the root. Astro ships zero client-side JavaScript by default. Pages compile to static HTML and CSS, distributed across edge CDNs.

The technical wins showed up instantly:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) plummeted from 840ms down to 42ms.
• First Contentful Paint dropped from 1.8s to 0.4s.
• Organic crawl efficiency jumped because search bots receive clean HTML without waiting on client scripts.
• Hosting costs dropped to near zero. Static edge delivery costs pennies compared to keeping MySQL servers alive.

Shipping Content at Warp Speed

The main knock on static sites has always been editor friction. Marketers hate opening pull requests, editing raw YAML, or dealing with Git branch conflicts.

We bypassed that by putting our custom publisher agent in front of Bitbucket. Marketing authors write copy and drop images straight into chat. The agent verifies frontmatter schemas with Zod, scales images to WebP, opens the PR to dev, and merges automatically.

We can pump out new service pages, blogs, and industry landing pages in under two minutes, with zero chance of breaking site code.

If your marketing site is bogged down by slow WordPress plugins and runaway hosting bills, let’s talk.