AstroBuildCMS pairs a blazing-fast Astro front-end with a familiar PHP admin and a plugin system you already understand. Publish in a click. No rebuilds. No bloat. Runs on £3-a-month shared hosting.
Already powering fitnessstarnetwork.com in production.
# publish an article from anywhere — a script, a pipeline, a cron curl -X POST https://yoursite.com/api/v1/posts.php \ -H "X-API-Key: abc_•••••" \ -d '{"title":"5 Kettlebell Workouts","category":"Fitness","status":"publish"}' → { "ok": true, "url": ".../blog/5-kettlebell-workouts/" } # live instantly. no build.
All the tools you expect from a real CMS — without the plugin roulette, the security patches, or the sluggish page loads.
Content is served from a lightweight API at runtime. Add a post and it's live — no build step, ever. Only design changes rebuild.
Toggle Podcast, Shop (Stripe cart), Analytics and SEO on or off. Activate to unlock; deactivate hides everything — your data is preserved.
Compose your homepage, navigation menu and sidebar visually. Reorder blocks, set grids and sources — no code.
News Mag, Podcast and Video themes. Change the entire front-end design while your content, plugins and settings stay put.
Per-page titles, meta, Open Graph, Twitter cards, canonical URLs, breadcrumbs, JSON-LD and a live sitemap — rendered server-side so crawlers and social scrapers always see them.
Structured data and content ItemLists so ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI can understand and cite your pages.
Publish, update and delete with an API key. Wire it to MiMo, n8n, a Google Sheet or any pipeline. Auto-creates categories, authors and tags.
TinyMCE WYSIWYG, a media library, per-post SEO with a live Google-snippet preview and score, scheduling, tags and bulk actions.
Static Astro + PHP + a remote MySQL database. No Node server. Deploys over FTP to any £3/month shared host.
The whole stack is installable and scriptable — one command sets up the database, one deploy ships the site.
Run the installer against a fresh MySQL database — it creates every table and seeds sensible defaults. Point config.php at your DB.
Pick a theme, flip on the plugins you need, and shape the homepage, menu and sidebar in the visual builders. Set your colours and logo.
Write in the admin or POST from your automation. It's live the instant you hit save — indexed, structured and share-ready.
Swap the entire front-end without migrating content. More themes and live demos landing soon.
Magazine layout — featured hero, post grids, category rows, sticky sidebar. Perfect for blogs, news and reviews.
Audio-first — episode players, series and a bold hero. Built for podcasts and audio shows.
Cinematic — a video grid with play overlays and watch pages. Dark and media-forward for channels and tutorials.
WordPress is powerful — and heavy. AstroBuildCMS keeps the parts you love and drops the parts you dread.
| AstroBuildCMS | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Front-end delivery | Static Astro — instant | PHP-rendered per request |
| Publish a post | Live instantly, no rebuild | Instant |
| Hosting | Any £3/mo shared host | Needs tuned PHP/managed host |
| Security surface | Tiny — static + read-only APIs | Large — plugins & themes |
| Plugins | Curated, first-party | 60k+ (quality varies) |
| SEO & schema | Built-in, server-side | Needs a plugin |
| Bloat | None | Common |
A modern static front-end, a battle-tested server language, and a plain SQL database. Deploy over FTP. Own your data.
No. Content is fetched from the API at runtime, so new posts, products and episodes appear the instant you save — from the admin or the API. Only design/template changes trigger a rebuild.
In your own MySQL database on your own host. There's no external service and no lock-in — it's plain SQL and standard files you deploy over FTP.
Yes. The write API takes an API key and accepts posts from any script, pipeline, cron job or automation — it even auto-creates categories, authors and tags for you.
Very. Meta tags, Open Graph, canonical URLs, breadcrumbs, JSON-LD structured data and the sitemap are all rendered server-side, plus AI-friendly content lists so LLMs can cite your pages.
Both — as toggleable plugins. The Shop plugin adds a Stripe cart, orders and checkout; the Podcast plugin adds episode pages with players. Turn them on only when you need them.