Testing New Frameworks for Insane Speeds

I’ve been building websites since 1996, and if there’s one thing that remains constant in this industry, it’s that technology moves incredibly fast. I’ve been using WordPress as my primary CMS since 2008, and it has been the absolute go-to for almost everything I do.

But I knew this time was coming. I realized it would eventually make sense to start looking beyond a single platform to get the absolute best performance. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons we officially changed our agency’s name from ClockworkWP to Clockwork Web Dev back in September 2024. We wanted to make sure we weren’t tied to WordPress. Although it has helped me start multiple businesses, I knew WordPress had new competitors, and those competitors were lightweight and screamingly fast!

Lately, I’ve been playing around in the lab, testing out some different frameworks to see what the next generation of web development looks like. I had asked A.I. which frameworks are fastest and can work with Tailwind and I decided to check it out. And after realizing Astro was great, I wanted some kind of CMS to go with it.

I’ll keep the exact details a little vague for now since I’m still deep in the experimentation phase, but I am looking closely at a few modern alternatives. I’ve been kicking the tires on emdash-cms (https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash) and Payload CMS (https://payloadcms.com/).

If you haven’t looked into Astro, it’s a frontend framework that essentially ships zero JavaScript to the browser by default. When you hook up a structured, modern CMS like Payload or EmDash to an Astro frontend, the result is that the site is just SOOOO FAST. It’s a completely different league of performance compared to a heavy, traditional setup.

I’m not ditching WordPress, I’m being a realist and I know there are ways to build sites that are faster, and WordPress is not the answer. Of course, this only (at this time) affects sites that are more “marketing-only” sites. You can’t have a “static HTML” site and do e-commerce, or have people sign up.

I’ll share more as I figure out exactly how these tools might fit into my workflow and benefit the projects we build.