From WordPress to Claude Code: Building Our Website

This site has been rebuilt more than once, and each version taught us something. The short version: we went from a clunky, expensive drag-and-drop site to one that’s simple, basically free, and genuinely ours — and the difference came down to the tools. Here’s the honest journey.

Chapter 1: The WordPress years (and a wedding to launch)

Our very first site lived on WordPress, hosted on Bluehost. We built it for our wedding, and we figured a visual, drag-and-drop builder would be the easy path. It wasn’t.

We had to learn a whole vocabulary just to get started — themes, blocks, Elementor, plugins — and stitch them all together. The drag-and-drop interface looked simpler, but in practice it was fiddly and frustrating: things that should’ve taken minutes took evenings. And all we wanted was a simple wedding site — a photo gallery, an RSVP form, wedding info, and a “things to do” page. Even that proved surprisingly tough to launch and keep tidy.

On top of the frustration, it came with a recurring Bluehost/WordPress bill for what was, in the end, a handful of pages.

Chapter 2: The 2025 rebuild — code, finally, but a flat design

In 2025 we decided to start over and turn the site into a proper blog. This time we went the code route and leaned on AI tools to do it — GitHub Copilot, the Kiro CLI, and VS Code — to build the first version on a clean, static foundation.

It was a real step up: faster, lighter, no plugin sprawl. But honestly? The design was lacking. It worked, but it didn’t feel like us. The bones were good; the soul wasn’t there yet.

Chapter 3: 2026 — Claude Code, and the magic finally happened

The latest rebuild was done with Claude Code running Opus 4.8, and this is where it all clicked. Instead of wrestling an interface or babysitting autocomplete, we just chatted in natural language with an assistant that works right in the terminal — it reads the actual project, makes the edits, runs the build, and commits the changes.

A few moments stood out:

• It planned the whole approach with us. It even helped us think through how to host the site and walked us through architectural decisions — like using Formspree for form hosting and choosing Jekyll as the foundation — explaining the trade-offs in plain English.
• It gave us an honest audit. The first thing it did was read our existing site and tell us what was broken: our stylesheet was never even linked, the mobile menu didn’t work, the homepage was hardcoded, and the gallery pointed at images that didn’t exist. Things we’d never have caught.
• Hannah drove the design. It asked us a handful of pointed design questions, and Hannah — putting her architect’s eye to work — chose the direction: an earthy, organic feel, a stone-and-sage palette, an elegant serif paired with a clean sans, and a full-bleed photo hero. The AI built to that brief.
• It built a real system. A proper design system and reusable components — one “post card” now powers the homepage, blog, travel, and projects pages. Add a post and it appears everywhere automatically.
• It set up local previews. It installed and configured Ruby so we can run the site on our own machine and see changes instantly — no more publishing just to test.
• Our words stayed ours. For the year-in-review posts it worked from our raw notes, and it asked before publishing anything personal rather than assuming.

The whole loop is just: chat in plain language → build a local repo → test it → commit. That’s it.

The payoff: simple, and basically free

Here’s the part that still makes us smile. This site now costs us almost nothing — we just renew the domain name once a year. No more expensive Bluehost and WordPress subscriptions. No more clunky drag-and-drop editors. No plugin updates to chase. GitHub Pages hosts it for free and rebuilds it automatically every time we push.

The current stack

• Jekyll — a static site generator; every post is just a Markdown file
• Tailwind CSS plus a custom CSS design system for our own look
• Google Fonts — Fraunces for headlines, Inter for body
• Formspree — powers the subscribe form
• GitHub Pages — free hosting that rebuilds on every push
• rbenv + Ruby — so we can preview locally before anything goes live

No database, no servers, no monthly bill. The site is just files — fast, secure, and truly ours.

What we kept firmly in our hands

AI did the heavy lifting, but some things stay human:

• Content — our words, our stories
• Design taste — the aesthetic calls were ours (well, Hannah’s)
• What’s public — especially the personal stuff; nothing sensitive goes up without us choosing it

Lessons learned

1. The fancy visual builder isn’t always the easy path. Our “simpler” drag-and-drop WordPress site was the most frustrating one we ever made.
2. Good tools change everything. Same two people, three very different experiences — the difference was the tooling, not us.
3. AI is a collaborator, not a replacement. It’s most powerful when you already know what you want, and when you let it tell you what’s broken.
4. Specific direction beats vague prompts. “Earthy and organic, stone and sage” got a far better result than “make it look nice.”
5. Review everything. Even this post’s first draft was generic filler we later replaced with the truth.

The result

We’re genuinely proud of how the site turned out — and a little amazed at how little it costs and how good it feels to maintain. From a frustrating, pricey WordPress wedding site to a free, fast blog we can update by chatting with an assistant at the kitchen table: that’s the whole arc.

If you’re thinking about building your own site, our advice is simple: don’t assume the drag-and-drop builder is easier, start with a clear vision, let an AI handle the structure and boilerplate, keep creative control over design and content — and test everything locally before you publish.