Rebuilding this website with Claude Code
How I moved LowkeyIT off a WordPress plan I'd outgrown, cut the yearly cost by about 90%, and fixed a security problem along the way.
My old site ran on a WordPress.com plan with a page-builder plugin. It looked fine when I set it up, but it had quietly rotted:
- A critical security warning. The page-builder plugin had been flagged as vulnerable since May 2025, and it couldn’t be updated without renewing a separate license.
- Broken links. Most menu items pointed at pages that were never published.
- About $253 a year for hosting, email and two domains, for a site that almost nobody visited.
That’s the same situation a lot of small businesses are in: a site someone built once, that nobody has looked at since.
What I did
I worked through it with Claude Code, the same way I’d help a client:
- Stopped the bleeding first. Updated the theme, removed the vulnerable plugin, cleaned out the broken menu links, and re-ran the security scan until it came back clean.
- Rebuilt the site from scratch as a small static site (Astro), using the original LowkeyIT artwork: the circuit-trace design and the wordmark from my first business cards.
- Tested it like I test software at work: every link, every page on a phone and a desktop, light and dark mode.
Why a static site
A static site is just files. There is no database to hack, no plugins to patch, and hosting it costs nothing. I edit it by asking Claude Code for changes, then I review them before they go live.
For a small business that mostly needs “here’s who we are and how to reach us,” that’s often a better fit than a full WordPress setup.
The result
- Security warnings: none, because there’s nothing to exploit.
- Yearly cost: roughly the price of the two domain names.
- Changes: minutes, not an afternoon in a page builder.
If your site has been sitting untouched for a few years, give me a call. I’ll tell you honestly whether it needs a rebuild or just a cleanup.