// articles
Articles.
Notes on a web that won't sit still.
For years, building on WordPress meant fighting the same handful of problems on repeat — not much worth writing down. The modern stack changed that: static builds, edge hosting, and sites that AI assistants actually read. It moves fast, and there's usually something new worth explaining — so this is where I do it, plainly, and only when it earns your time.
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// 1 July 2026
- · performance
- · static sites
- · business
Your customers are on one bar of signal. A slow website loses them.
We obsess over Lighthouse scores, but to someone standing outside your café on a patchy Dartmoor lane, or reading between Tube stations, speed is simpler than that — the page either loads before they give up, or it doesn't. What the research actually says about how many you lose, and why a static site is the fix.
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// 10 June 2026
- · ai
- · seo
- · analytics
AI reads websites now. Yours might be turning it away.
I pulled a month of server logs for one client and found AI reading their pages more than every human visitor combined — none of it visible in analytics. What that means, how AI actually visits your site, and why some hosting quietly blocks the fastest-growing way to be found.
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// 20 May 2026
- · cloudflare
- · astro
- · cms
EmDash: Cloudflare's CMS for Astro. Not yet on client sites — but worth watching.
A short note on EmDash, the Astro-based CMS Cloudflare released in beta last month. The architecture is genuinely interesting — sandboxed plugins, capability manifests, end-to-end TypeScript — and it solves the worst of WordPress's structural problems by design. I am not deploying it yet. I think it is the future.
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// 22 April 2026
- · wordpress
- · astro
- · security
Why I'm leading with static sites now (and what changed about WordPress)
I used to recommend WordPress to every small business that walked through the door. I don't anymore. A note on the maintenance treadmill, the cumulative cost of plugins, and the recent supply-chain attacks that made me reconsider what "easy" actually means.
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// 18 March 2026
- · privacy
- · analytics
- · performance
Google Analytics is a bit wrong. Here's how I use it anyway.
Why I run two kinds of analytics on the sites I build — accurate, cookieless measurement for the truth, and Google Analytics for the trends and the features it is genuinely good at, gated behind real consent.
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// 18 February 2026
- · hosting
- · cloudflare
- · infrastructure
Where your website actually lives — Cloudflare's edge vs SiteGround's servers
A plain-English explanation of what "hosting" actually does, why Cloudflare's edge model is structurally different from traditional shared hosting like SiteGround, and why most of the websites that load fastest on your phone today are running on infrastructure that didn't exist when WordPress was designed.
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