CMS overhaul: from optimized CMS to static site

Two realities. On one side, corporate sites running CMSs such as Drupal, TYPO3 and others, with security, SEO and editorial governance requirements. On the other, WordPress brochure sites costing maintenance, plugins and incidents, for a few pages that change three times a year.

1. Ask the real question

How many pages change, how often, and who edits them? The answer drives the architecture, long before the CMS brand.

2. Compare comparable things

Drupal, Craft CMS, headless CMS, server or client rendering. License cost, available skills, SEO impact, security, running cost.

3. Write the specification before consulting vendors

No quotes without a written baseline: content types, roles, languages, integrations, volumes, security requirements. Otherwise bids cannot be compared.

4. Large site: keep the CMS, go headless

When the company needs its CMS (roles, workflows, languages, volume), going headless separates editing from delivery: the CMS stays internal and unexposed, and the public site is generated, then served behind a load balancer, WAAP and CDN. Gains: performance, a smaller attack surface, fewer dependencies.

5. Small brochure site: from WordPress to static

Example: the brochure site of a small business. WordPress content extraction, rebuild in HTML and CSS with AI, URL preservation, redirects, WebP images, revised tags and structured data.

6. Verify before switching

Page-by-page comparison, redirect checks, performance and mobile rendering tests, then go live with a rollback option.

• Static is not a universal answer: as soon as you need user accounts, advanced search or daily publishing, a CMS remains the right tool.
• A migration without a redirect plan costs months of search visibility.
• AI speeds up the rebuild, but every page must be reviewed: when content is missing, it sometimes makes it up, and that has to be caught and fixed.

On that brochure site: noticeably faster rendering, no database or plugins left to maintain, attack surface reduced to static files. On large sites, headless applies the same logic without giving up the CMS. Want to see my work? Get in touch.