In plain English: Our WordPress homepage made 56 requests to 14 domains. The static rebuild makes 15, all to our own domain, with zero cookies. WordPress still wins for sites many people edit daily.
Open our old homepage and, before you'd read a single headline, your browser had already made 56 requests to 14 different domains, loaded 22 scripts and collected 8 cookies. Plus an 11 MB background video, in case your phone was feeling too fast that day.
For a company that sells digital efficiency, that was getting a little embarrassing.
So in September 2026 we fired WordPress. Nothing personal — it served us for years, like it serves millions of company websites. But the numbers after the move speak for themselves.
The before-and-after (brace yourself)
We loaded both homepages in the same browser and counted everything that came over the wire:
| WordPress + Divi | New static site | |
|---|---|---|
| Requests to load the homepage | 56 | 15 |
| Domains contacted | 14 | 1 |
| Scripts loaded | 22 | 1 |
| Cookies set | 8 | 0 |
| Data loaded (uncompressed) | ≈ 11 MB, incl. a background video | ≈ 335 KB, mostly our own fonts |
| Server to maintain and patch | Yes | No |
That's roughly 30 times less data for the same message — and every single request goes to our own domain. (The new numbers exclude the small Cloudflare analytics beacon, which adds one request and no cookies.)
How a website ends up with 22 scripts
Nobody sits down and decides to load 22 scripts from 14 domains. It creeps up on you, one reasonable decision at a time:
- The page builder ships jQuery, its own framework, icon fonts and animation libraries — on every page, whether you use them or not.
- Plugins each bring a stylesheet or a script: caching, image optimisation, forms, chat.
- Marketing tags pile up like receipts in a glovebox. We found Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, the Meta Pixel, a second analytics tool — and the old Universal Analytics script, which Google switched off in 2023 and which had been loading faithfully for nobody ever since.
- Spam protection via reCAPTCHA loaded more Google scripts, including on the homepage — just to guard one newsletter field.
Each addition made sense on the day. Together they made the site slower, harder to explain in a privacy policy, and a quiet liability.
Your move: open your own homepage, press F12, go to the Network tab and reload. If the request counter passes 50, keep reading.
// quick one
Want us to do this for you? We only take a few new clients at a time.
See if you’re a fitWhat we built instead
The new veonio.com is static HTML with one stylesheet, one small script and self-hosted fonts, generated by a build step (Astro) and served from Cloudflare's edge network. No database. No admin panel. No PHP to patch at 11 pm.
- Content lives in files. Pages are templates, blog posts are Markdown. Every change is a Git commit, reviewed and deployed automatically. Publishing a post means clicking "merge".
- Fonts are self-hosted. No requests to Google Fonts — which in the EU isn't just a speed question but a GDPR one, since a Munich court ordered a website operator to pay a visitor damages over them in 2022.
- Forms run on serverless functions. The application form, the newsletter sign-up and our Digital Readiness Scorecard post to small Cloudflare functions that validate the input, store it and send e-mail. Spam protection comes from Cloudflare Turnstile, and it only loads on pages that actually have a form.
- Old URLs keep working. Every retired page and blog post redirects to its closest new equivalent, so search rankings and old links survive the move.
What it saves (the obvious part)
Hosting. A managed WordPress plan costs real money every month; a static site on Cloudflare Pages fits comfortably in the free tier for most company websites.
What it saves (the part that actually matters)
- No maintenance treadmill. No plugin updates, no PHP upgrades, no security patches, no "the site broke after an update" Monday mornings.
- Less to attack. A site without a login page and a database gives attackers very little to aim at.
- A shorter privacy policy. When the site doesn't load trackers, you don't have to explain them — or nag visitors with a cookie banner.
- Faster pages. Less to download means faster pages, especially on mobile, which helps visitors and search rankings alike.
The honest downsides
We'd be doing you a disservice if we pretended this was free lunch.
- No visual editor. Changing a page means editing a file, not dragging blocks around. For us that's a feature. For a marketing team that rebuilds landing pages daily, it may not be.
- Features need building. WordPress has a plugin for everything. Here, a signup or a booking form is a small piece of code. It's usually cleaner — but someone has to write it.
- The migration is a project. Moving content, rebuilding templates and mapping every old URL takes typically a few days for a company site.
Should you fire yours?
Keep WordPress (or a similar CMS) if several non-technical people publish every week, if you rely on plugins with real business logic — memberships, complex e-commerce, learning platforms — or if nobody will own a Git-based workflow.
Fire it if your website mostly presents your company, publishes an article now and then and collects inquiries. That's most B2B websites. For those, a static site is faster, cheaper, safer and simpler — and the move pays for itself quickly.
Curious how your own setup stacks up? The free Digital Readiness Scorecard checks your website and infrastructure along with four other areas — in three minutes. Or send us your URL and we'll tell you honestly whether a move is worth it.