My New Website Is Live (I Finally Left WordPress)
My new website is live. I rebuilt ryandoser.com from scratch last week with Claude Code, and I could not be happier to be off WordPress.
I did not hire anyone, I did not open a page builder, and I did not touch a single plugin. I described what I wanted, reviewed what came back, and shipped it. The whole thing took about a week of evenings.
The Stack Behind the New Site
Four tools, and only one of them costs me anything.
Claude Code does the actual building. It reads my files, writes the code, and explains what it changed. GitHub stores every file and every version, so nothing lives on a server I cannot see. Cloudflare Pages hosts and deploys it. And Astro is the framework underneath, which is built for content sites like a blog and ships almost no JavaScript by default.
I also ran the design work past Codex as a second opinion. Two models looking at the same layout catch different things, and it is cheap insurance when you are not a developer.
The rebuild also turned into something reusable. I packaged the whole process as a Personal Brand Website skill and added it to my Claude Code Skills Stack, alongside the 40+ other skills I run every day. Next time I build a site, I start from that skill instead of from scratch.
What it actually costs to run
- $10 per year for my domain
- $0 for GitHub
- $0 for Cloudflare
- $0 for Astro
That is the entire hosting bill. The only real line item is the $100 per month Claude Max plan, and I was already paying for that to run everything else in my business. It is not a website expense, it is the tool I work in all day.
Compare that to what I was doing before: a monthly platform fee, plus premium plugins, plus a theme, plus whatever the next thing was that broke and needed a paid fix.
Why I Left WordPress
WordPress was not the problem on day one. It was the accumulation. And to be clear about where I landed: I am not touching WordPress, Webflow, Wix, or Squarespace again.
Every plugin was another thing to update, another thing that could conflict, another thing with its own subscription. Moving a single button meant wrestling a visual editor that fought me on spacing. And the site got slower as it got older, which is exactly backwards.
The part that finally pushed me out was ownership. On WordPress my content lived inside a database I could not read, wrapped in page-builder markup that only made sense to the page builder. Now every post on this site is a plain text file in a folder. I can read it, search it, back it up, or move it somewhere else tomorrow.
I am not the only one who noticed this shift. I wrote about Cloudflare's EmDash CMS and whether it kills WordPress when it launched, and the pattern is the same: the tooling got good enough that the tradeoff stopped making sense.
Changes Now Ship in Seconds
I describe a change in Claude Code. It edits the files. I push to GitHub, Cloudflare rebuilds the site, and it is live in about a minute. No dashboard, no cache to clear, no staging environment to sync, no plugin update to pray over.
Fixing a typo used to be a five-minute round trip through wp-admin. Now it is one sentence.
You Can Do This Without Being a Developer
I am a marketer. I do not write code, and I did not learn to for this.
What I did learn was how to describe what I wanted clearly, read what came back, and push back when it was wrong. That is the actual skill now, and it transfers to every site you will ever build.
If you want to see the process rather than the result, I have two walkthroughs that cover it. Watch me build a website with Claude in 30 minutes is the fast version, done live. How to build websites with Claude Code goes deeper on the GitHub and Cloudflare side, which is the part most people get stuck on.
And if you are wondering whether a cheaper model could do this job, I put six open source AI models up against Claude for web design using this exact site as the test case.
Ryan's Final Thoughts
The redesign is the small story here. The real one is that I own every file, my hosting is effectively free, and I can change anything on this site in the time it takes to type a sentence.
If a non-technical marketer like me can figure this out, then anyone reading this can too.
New Website Rebuild FAQs
What is ryandoser.com built with now?
The site runs on the Astro framework, with the code stored in a GitHub repository and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I build and edit it through Claude Code. Astro is designed for content-heavy sites and ships very little JavaScript, which is why the pages load fast.
How much does it cost to run a website on this stack?
My hosting cost is $0. GitHub, Cloudflare Pages, and Astro all have free tiers that comfortably cover a blog, so the only mandatory expense is about $10 per year for the domain. I pay $100 per month for Claude Max, but that is a tool I use across my whole business, not a hosting cost.
Do I need to know how to code to build a site this way?
No. I do not code and I did not learn to for this rebuild. You need to be able to describe what you want, review what the model produces, and say when something is wrong. Being comfortable in a terminal helps, but Claude Code walks you through the parts that are unfamiliar.
How long did the rebuild take?
About a week, working in the evenings around client work. Most of that time went to migrating existing blog posts and checking that old URLs still resolved, not to building the design itself.
Is this better than WordPress for everyone?
No. If you need a membership portal, an ecommerce store, or a large team editing content through a visual interface, WordPress or a hosted platform still makes sense. This stack is a strong fit for a blog, a portfolio, a landing page, or a local business site, which covers most of what people actually need.
Disclosure: some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy through them I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I actually use. Full disclosure.