More and more businesses are building their websites on modern frameworks like Astro. The sites are fast, cheap to host, and free of plugin bloat. Then, a few weeks after launch, the same question lands in our inbox: what is the best CMS for an Astro website? Someone still has to edit the blog, update the team page, change a legal notice. Which system goes behind the site?

The honest answer is that it depends on the business. But the old reflex, “just use WordPress”, is rarely the right fit for a modern site. Here are the real options, and how we choose between them.

First, why Astro changes the CMS question

A traditional WordPress site builds every page on the fly, each time a visitor arrives. Astro does the opposite: it builds the pages ahead of time, so what the visitor loads is plain, fast HTML. That speed is the whole point. But it also means the content and the editing tool are no longer glued together. You choose the CMS on purpose, instead of inheriting whatever the platform forces on you.

That freedom is good news. It is also why the decision matters.

Option 1: Keep WordPress as a headless backend

You keep the WordPress editor your team knows, and Astro pulls the content in through an API. For some sites, it is genuinely the right call.

Our client Hercules is a good example. It is an e-commerce business, and its products, collections, and blog posts all live in WordPress with WooCommerce. For a large, changing catalogue with orders, stock, and payments, WooCommerce is a mature, proven engine. Rebuilding all of that from scratch would be the wrong use of anyone’s money.

The trade-off: you still carry the full weight of WordPress (hosting, updates, security, plugins) just to manage content, and you maintain two systems instead of one. For a shop, that weight is justified. For a five-page site with a blog, it is a lot of machinery to change some text.

Option 2: A git or markdown CMS

Tools like Decap or TinaCMS keep your content as simple files inside the website’s code, edited through a light interface. It is cheap, it fits Astro naturally, and for a straightforward blog it is often all you need.

The limit shows up quickly with non-technical editors. The moment you want media libraries, user roles, or a real workflow, a file-based editor starts to feel fragile.

Option 3: A hosted headless CMS

Sanity, Storyblok, and Contentful give you polished editors and properly structured content. For a content team, they are pleasant to use.

The trade-offs are a monthly fee that grows as you grow, one more outside service to depend on, and a generic content model you bend to fit your site, instead of a tool shaped around your business.

Option 4: A custom CMS built for the site

Here is the option most agencies skip, because until recently it was too expensive to justify. You build the admin around the exact site, with only the screens the client actually uses. No plugin menu. No dashboard full of features nobody opens.

This is what we built for Immobilière Pujol, a Brussels real-estate agency, and it is still one of the projects we are proudest of. It was a big, human project: thousands of pages, a full migration off WordPress, and a team that needed to run the site every day without ever touching code.

So we built them their own admin, directly on their Astro site, with Cloudflare behind it and no WordPress anywhere. The team writes and publishes blog posts, with the SEO fields built right into the form. They manage their agents: photos, roles, phone numbers. They edit their legal pages with no risk of breaking a link. And they compose a branded newsletter that pulls in their latest articles, ready to send to their list.

The property listings? Never retyped. They sync automatically, every hour, straight from the agency’s property feed. The system does the boring part on its own.

That is the difference. The client got a tool that matches how they actually work, not a generic panel they have to learn and fight.

Option 5: The agentic CMS, no interface at all

There is one more option, and it is the newest: remove the admin entirely.

In an agentic CMS, you do not log into anything. You send a WhatsApp or Telegram message to an AI agent, and the machinery behind it does the work:

Content creation: blog posts, page copy, even the social media versions.
Site building and publishing: pages, structure, sections, and the technical layer (structured data, JSON-LD) generated and published to your editorial line.
Technical upkeep: internal linking, keeping your strategic pages balanced and connected.
External data: the system pulls in Google Analytics, Search Console, speed measurements, and keyword monitoring on its own.
Automatic workflows: SEO audits that fix what they find, content improvement suggestions, new content proposals.

We run parts of this today. Our own marketing content is produced and published by an agentic pipeline, and we build WhatsApp agents that run real operations for clients. The full chat-only CMS is not science fiction; it is being built right now, by us and by others.

The honest nuance: most business owners still want to see something. A screen, even a tiny one, gives trust and control that a chat window does not. That is why we see the near future as agentic machinery underneath, with a small custom interface on top, for confidence.

Why a custom CMS is finally realistic

For years, “build a custom CMS” meant a long, expensive project. That is the part that changed. AI-assisted development lowered the cost of a tailored build. The same shift that lets us generate a website quickly lets us generate its admin: the client’s real fields, their real workflow, their exact needs.

It is a simple idea. If you are going to generate the website with AI, why hand the client a generic backend from 2010 to run it? Generate the CMS too, and make it theirs.

So which CMS should you choose?

A simple blog on Astro: a git or markdown CMS is plenty.
A real online shop with stock and orders: WordPress with WooCommerce, or a dedicated commerce platform, earns its place.
A content team that wants a polished editor for standard content: a hosted headless CMS.
A content-heavy business with its own workflow, non-technical editors, and parts that should stay automatic: a custom CMS is worth every euro.
A business ready to run its website by chat and let agents handle content, SEO, and monitoring: the agentic CMS is arriving fast, and we build toward it.

The mistake is starting from the tool. Start from what the business truly needs to edit, then choose the CMS that fits. For a lot of modern sites, that is no longer WordPress. Custom made or agentic, the winning CMS is the one shaped around your business.

If you are weighing this up for your own site, tell us what you need to manage and we will point you to the honest answer, even when that answer is not a custom build.

FAQ: choosing a CMS for an Astro website

Does Astro have a built-in CMS? No. Astro is a website framework, not a CMS. It reads content from wherever you decide: markdown files, a headless CMS, WordPress, or a custom admin. The choice is yours to make.

Can I use WordPress with Astro? Yes. You can run WordPress “headless”, keeping its editor while Astro builds the front end. It suits sites with big, changing catalogues, like an online shop. For a simple site, it is usually more weight than it is worth.

What is a custom CMS? An admin built specifically for one website, with only the features that site needs. The client edits their blog, team, or legal pages through screens made for them, with no plugins and nothing they will never use.

Is a custom CMS more expensive than WordPress? It used to be. With AI-assisted development, a tailored CMS is now a realistic option for many businesses, and it removes the ongoing cost and risk of plugins, updates, and hosting that WordPress carries.

What can I edit myself with a custom CMS? Whatever we agree matters. For our real-estate client, that means blog posts (with SEO fields), team members, legal pages, and newsletters, while property listings sync automatically from their feed. We define the exact list with you before we build.

What is an agentic CMS? A CMS with no admin interface at all. You talk to an AI agent (for example on WhatsApp), and it creates and publishes content, maintains the site’s technical SEO, pulls in your analytics and rankings, and runs audit-and-fix workflows automatically. It is the newest option, and elements of it are already in production today.

Will a custom CMS hurt my SEO? No. Because the site is built ahead of time on Astro, pages stay fast, and the SEO controls (titles, descriptions, clean URLs) live inside the editing forms. Done right, a migration keeps every ranking.