This is the first post on my new website which is still proudly powered by WordPress.
Yes, WordPress.
I know it’s trending these days to talk about using Claude to build static sites with a markdown “database” and how that’s made your site better and faster.
But guess what?
This website is also built by Claude. And guess what? It’s fast.
You know what else? It’s flexible and powerful and it’s easy for me to extend in the future.
I have comments, and contact form and I can wire up a newsletter or anything I want without having to rely on AI slop or integrating 3rd party providers.
There are obviously downsides such as the lack of Agent-readiness but that’s going to change in the near future so I’m not too worried.
How is it so fast?#
This site has a reasonably high page speed score.
It honestly wasn’t that hard to achieve as WordPress Core does a pretty decent job of optimising things these days.
The main overhead is the time to dynamically generate and serve the page server side which will never be as fast as static HTML files.
I work around this with some simple caching which is supplied by my host and some CSS and JS optimisation which I handle via Jetpack but could just as easily be enabled by any number of free Plugins (or Claude could have whisked one up!).
If id been hand rolling this caching layer myself on a VPS it would have been too much overhead. But honestly most good WordPress hosts (I recommend Pressable or WordPress.com) these days have this built in and if they don’t there’s always Jetpack (which is actually really good these days!).
Honestly I’m happy to accept this configuration trade off in return for a better overall framework.
I can understand why others aren’t – especially for simpler sites.
What about the design?#
I had Claude prototype the entire site in HTML and CSS only.
It’s remarkable how good Opus is at basic design these days and it’s even better when you don’t put any technical barrier between it and the final expression of its design intent .
I then asked Claude to convert to a block theme and honestly it didn’t do a great job.
The issue was it just tried to port the code wholesale into a theme rather than leaning into the WordPress way of
- Global styles
- Patterns
- Style variations
To fix this I enabled Automattic’s WordPress agent skills for WordPress and told Claude to redo its work. The result was a proper working block theme configured using modern standards.
Now would your average person know to do this? Probably not but I’ve seen similar issues when using AI building with platforms such as Laravel.
What I do think is that we should make WordPress expose these skills natively as part of Core.
When an agent encounters a WordPress admin UI a Web MCP could offer it skills for WordPress best practices. That would mean it “just works” first time. When WordPress is fully AI enabled the same could be offered to an agent connected to the platform over traditional MCP.
WordPress could be a canvas for agents to express themselves on the open web. That’s not there right now but we are not far away and it’s critical for the survival of the platform.
The end result?#
Overall I’m pretty happy. It took me a day to build out the site by prompting Claude in my spare time around other commitments.
If you’d told me I could do that even 1 year ago I’d have said it was pretty wild.
I now have a fast, secure and powerful framework to build on top of. And it’s only going to get more powerful in 2027 when it becomes full AI enabled.
I’m curious – have you recently built a WordPress website using AI? I’d love to hear more about your experiences.
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