G’day Rankers. We’ve moved the StewArt Media website off WordPress. The site you’re reading now runs on Astro, and Hermes helps me manage it.

I say I built the new site. More accurately, I directed the agent. Instead of logging into WordPress, finding the right editor and working around plugins, I tell it what I want changed. It prepares the work for review.

In this video, I show what that looks like: a new landing page, built and tested in about 10–15 minutes.

Watch Jim Stewart explain how he replaced WordPress with an AI-managed Astro website

Watch the video on YouTube · 8 minutes

The useful part is getting changes done

We’d been working through ideas for a short video about agent-managed websites. Once we’d settled on a concept, I asked Hermes to build a landing page around it.

I didn’t give it a new brief for every line of copy. It already had the business context and the work we’d just done together.

For the video concept, I’d asked it to research the main pain points for WordPress users. I expected security to lead. The research it brought back pointed instead to the frustration of getting updates done. That became the focus of the landing page.

That rings true from our own work. A small change can sit in a queue while people pass it between the owner, the agency and the developer. A new landing page can take longer still.

In the demonstration, the agent wrote the copy, built the page and tested it on mobile and desktop, including Chrome and Safari. I’ve sped up the recording, but the work took about 10–15 minutes. That’s the time for this landing page, with the concept and business context already in place, not a promise to rebuild any website in fifteen minutes.

Context matters more than another enormous prompt

Prompting still matters. But if an agent already knows the business, the audience and the work you’ve approved, you shouldn’t have to explain all of that again for every task.

That’s what made this useful. The landing page followed from the work we’d already done, rather than starting with a blank chat and another long brief.

It doesn’t remove my judgement. I still need to decide whether the offer is right, whether the claims are accurate and whether the page should go live.

What changed when we left WordPress

Astro builds the pages as HTML. Visitors don’t need an AI model to run just to read an article, and I no longer have a WordPress plugin stack to manage on this site.

In the video, I talk about seeing scores of 100 in the PageSpeed tests on our new site. I know good WordPress developers can achieve excellent results too. This is our experience with this rebuild, not a claim that WordPress can never be fast or that every future test will return the same score.

The bigger benefit for me is the operating workflow. I can ask for a page change and review the result without having to remember where a setting lives in the CMS.

There is still a website to maintain. Forms, links, content, measurement and releases still need checking. An agent helps do that work; it doesn’t make the responsibility disappear.

We also cleaned up the content

The old site had roughly 1,000 pages. It had been around a long time, and some of the content had been neglected.

My direction was to keep the useful articles, retain the evergreen material and consolidate the rest. In the video, I describe getting the site down to fewer than 200 pages, including the new content and case studies.

That isn’t a recommendation to delete most of your website. A migration needs decisions about the old addresses, useful content and relevant redirects. We’ve explained those checks in how this site runs.

Keep the human judgement

The work that machines can handle should be handled by machines. The human still needs to make the calls that matter.

We’re using Hermes, but the point isn’t that everyone must use our agent or our exact setup. It’s that maintaining a business website no longer has to mean the owner spending their time inside a content management system.

If you want to see the technical approach, read how we built and operate this site. If you want help getting your own website changes moving, see our agent-operated website service or talk to us about your site.

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