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Binu Pradeep

Bakkhus Merlot: Migrating a Family Business Website from WordPress to Astro on Cloudflare

I rebuilt the website for Bakkhus Merlot Industries, a family business, moving it from WordPress on a paid cloud server to a static Astro site on Cloudflare. The goal was to cut cost and maintenance to near zero without making the site harder for the owner to update.

Why Migrate

Section titled “Why Migrate”
  • Cost: a small server plus a WordPress stack is a monthly bill for a brochure site.
  • Maintenance: a PHP site with plugins needs constant updates and is a regular target for bots. This one had no reason to run code on every request.
  • Speed: a catalog of product pages is the ideal fit for pre-built static pages served from a CDN.

What I Built

Section titled “What I Built”
  • Static site with Astro. Every page is generated at build time. There is no database, no PHP, no cookies, no analytics and no forms. Contact is by email only.
  • Content as files. Products, categories, clients, testimonials and page text are plain content files. Adding a product means adding one file, and a new category appears in the filters, footer and brands page automatically.
  • No-code editing. A browser-based CMS lets the owner edit text and products without touching code. Each save becomes a Git commit, and the site redeploys in about a minute.
  • Cloudflare hosting. Static assets are served from the edge on the free tier. Every push to main deploys, and every pull request gets a preview URL.
  • Placeholders by default. Until a product photo exists, the site shows a tinted placeholder, so the build never breaks over missing images.

Migration Details That Mattered

Section titled “Migration Details That Mattered”
  • 301 redirects for old WordPress URLs. Product, shop, category, feed and admin paths all map to their new equivalents, so existing links and search rankings survive.
  • Email left alone. Company mail runs on a separate provider, so the cutover touched web records only, and the old host stayed up until the new site was verified.
  • Scraper-resistant contact details. Email addresses are assembled in the browser, so they are not sitting in the HTML for harvesters.
  • Age notice without cookies. The age gate this industry needs stores a single flag in local storage.
  • Security and caching headers are defined in the repo, alongside the content.
  • Image pipeline. Photos are optimized at build time, and the original WordPress crawl and source images are kept out of Git.

Result

Section titled “Result”

A fast, secure site that costs nothing to host, has nothing to patch, and can be edited by its owner. It is a small project, but it applies the same habits as the bigger ones: pick boring technology, keep state in files, and make the safe thing the default.