Tech
Tech Dejan MurkoDropping WordPress for Astro built by Claude Code
WordPress has been the platform for our blogs since the company's founding in 2007. We've used it because it was the simplest way to have a blog to which everyone can post. For most of this time we used a custom framework for sales pages and had blog on a subdomain or later on /blog, proxied via Cloudflare.
Dejan Murko 
But, I’d argue like most users of WordPress, we weren’t really happy with it. It was bloated for our use: plugins for every minor feature, constant updates, potential issues with security and so on. And our custom framework was just ok, but it wasn’t fast enough for my taste and we had to mix and match WordPress and even some static docs. The main issue - I couldn’t really easily design things on my own without asking a designer and developer for help.
With Claude Code being regularly used by me, as a non-developer, we decided it’s time to revisit a new custom framework. After a few detours, we built Hakuto, an open-source site builder based on Astro. Astro is a framework for websites and it supports markdown collections for things like docs and blog. The final result is Hakuto as a Claude Code plugin.
The goal was to get our sales page, docs pages, and blog all on our platform. And this is what you’re looking at now! The blog is run by Astro’s markdown collections, and on Pareto Security, you can also check the docs (which are in markdown in the backend and easily editable). So now, all of this is easily managed on one framework, zero potential security issues, and so, so much faster.
Mobile PageSpeed Test for niteo.co
- Performance Score: 75 → 100
- FCP: 1.7s → 0.9s (-47%)
- LCP: 2.5s → 1.7s (-32%)
- Speed Index: 4.6s → 0.9s (-80%)
Mobile PageSpeed Test for niteo.co/blog
- Performance Score: 92 → 100
- FCP: 2.0s → 1.1s (-45%)
- LCP: 2.9s → 1.7s (-42%)
- Speed Index: 3.5s → 2.1s (-60%)
Mobile PageSpeed Test for niteo.co/blog/post
- Performance Score: 89 → 100
- FCP: 2.3s → 0.9s (-60%)
- LCP: 3.4s → 1.7s (-50%)
- Speed Index: 2.4s → 0.9s (-62%)
No significant changes were made to the design.
We’ve moved all of our websites and blogs to Hakuto, and the transfer of WordPress is much easier than you’d expect. You can get the full instructions on the Hakuto blog post.
The other benefit of Hakuto is that it has built-in skills, so instead of WordPress plugins, you tell it to “run SEO audit” and then “fix it,” and you’re done!
If you’re interested, have a look at hakuto.dev. Completely free and open-source.
Dejan Murko
Dejan is the Director of Opportunities at Niteo, making sure we never run out of things to do.
