"Static" means every page is prepared in advance and delivered as a finished file — nothing gets assembled while your visitor waits, so there is nothing to slow down. Built on Astro, a modern framework, and delivered by Cloudflare's worldwide network: sub-second loads anywhere on Earth, hosting from £25/month, and a site that will still work in five years if nobody touches it.
// from £800 · hosted on managed Cloudflare from £25/mo
$ lighthouse https://willcocks.uk
performance 100
accessibility 100
this visit loaded in fast
// the pitch
Every promise below holds for a simple reason: the machinery that fails on ordinary websites isn't part of this one.
// always online
Always online
Served from 300+ cities worldwide with nothing to crash — there's no server or database that can go down at 2am.
// always fast
Always fast
Every page is ready before anyone asks for it. No queries, no processing — the site is done cooking before it reaches the table.
// always secure
Always secure
The things attackers target — admin logins, plugins, databases — physically aren't there. You can't pick a lock that doesn't exist.
// always up to date
Always up to date
No software stack to go stale, no monthly patches, no plugin auto-updates breaking things overnight. Launch day is forever.
// every version kept
Every version kept
The whole site lives in version control — better than a backup, because every change ever made can be rolled back in minutes.
// nothing to subscribe to
Nothing to subscribe to
No plugin licences quietly renewing every year. Hosting is the only running cost, and it starts at £25/month.
A WordPress site is a database, a PHP runtime, a theme, and dozens of plugins — every one of which is software that needs to be patched, every one of which is a possible attack vector, and every one of which is a thing that can break on the next auto-update. That architecture dates from 2003, and it shows. A static site is none of those things. It is a folder of files served from Cloudflare's edge — the modern way to build for the modern web. When the brief is "a fast, secure, professional brochure site," it's the simpler answer. It's also the serious one: Astro and Cloudflare are the stack Porsche, IKEA and OpenAI build on — and in 2026 Cloudflare acquired Astro, so the framework and the host became one company.
// why it works
// 01
Security
The most common WordPress attack vectors — SQL injection, plugin remote code execution, brute-forced wp-login, supply-chain compromise via auto-update — physically cannot exist on a static site, because the moving parts they target aren't there. The site is a set of pre-rendered HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. There's no admin panel for an attacker to break into and no plugin vulnerability list to monitor.
// 02
Speed
Files are served from Cloudflare's global edge — over 300 cities worldwide — so visitors get sub-second loads no matter where they are. There's no database query, no PHP execution, no server warm-up. The page is already rendered before the request arrives, and Astro ships zero JavaScript by default — which is why the Core Web Vitals stay green without a 'speed plugin'.
// 03
Design freedom
Astro has no theme system in the WordPress sense. Every component is custom-built. The design can be exactly what the brief requires, not a pre-made template stretched to fit.
// 04
Privacy by default
No tracking cookies, no consent banners required (Cloudflare Web Analytics is cookieless). You stay GDPR-compliant without the modal that asks every visitor to opt out.
// honest about the trade-off
Static sites aren't for everything. If self-managed content is non-negotiable, WordPress is the right answer instead — see the WordPress page.
// scale
On a static build, the expensive part is getting the design, structure and tone right. Once that exists, producing pages from it is fast — so I don't bill per page, and the right number of pages is however many the job needs.
That changes what's affordable. The searches that bring local customers are specific: the service and the town. A plumber in Ivybridge isn't found by "plumber" — they're found by "boiler repair Ivybridge" and "emergency plumber Totnes". Answering those searches properly takes a dedicated, genuinely useful page for each service in each area, and on a per-page invoice nobody builds them.
service & area pages
A page per service, per area you cover — each with its own copy, its own meta and structured data, all held to the same design. Twenty well-made pages targeting twenty real searches, not one "Areas we cover" list.
no thin pages
Search engines penalise near-duplicate "doorway" pages, so each page is written to be genuinely different and genuinely useful — what you do there, who you've done it for, how to reach you. If an area doesn't justify a real page, it doesn't get one.
structure search engines read
Semantic HTML, per-page titles and descriptions, LocalBusiness and Service structured data, a clean sitemap — the plumbing that makes every one of those pages eligible to rank, done on every page by default.
// in production
radmedia.com — the corporate site of a youth media group — is a fully static Astro build on Cloudflare: 33 prerendered pages, 25 video case studies, no server anywhere. Its sister publications culted.com and itsxo.com run the same architecture with a CMS attached, for a group whose brands reach a combined 120 million people a month.
This site is a static Astro build too. So is every static site I deliver — same approach, same toolchain, same hosting.
// stack
This site is a static site. So is every other static-site build I deliver — same approach, same toolchain, same hosting model. The transparency is the point: there's nothing proprietary, no lock-in, and any other Astro developer could pick the project up tomorrow.
// pricing
Priced by the project, never by the page. Static comes in levels — a focused Essential build for most small businesses, a larger Professional one, and genuinely custom platforms at Bespoke.
Hosting is £25/month on managed Cloudflare (domain renewal included), or £120/month with two hours of development bundled in — see hosting. Can't fund it up front? The cost can be spread over a year — around a quarter down, the rest monthly with hosting included, no interest.
included in the build
Custom design with no theme constraints, mobile-responsive, Lighthouse 90+ on launch, accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA, semantic HTML, on-page SEO and structured data, deployed to your domain with SSL configured.
also included
A staging URL while we build, written content guidance, image optimisation, view-transitions for app-like navigation between pages, and a clean handover.
after launch
Content edits and additions billed at £55/hour in 30-min increments. Most edits take around 30 minutes; a whole new section, about an hour — so a typical text-and-image update is £27.50, not a day rate. No retainer required, and most clients only change a handful of things a year.
// next step
A free call to talk through what you need and whether I can help. No follow-up sales pressure if it isn’t a fit.
