Moving a portfolio of event sites off WordPress

Five event websites rebuilt on a modern static stack in under three months, with same-day updates and no build costs.

The problem

Each show had its own WordPress site with its own theme and plugins. Small changes waited on whoever knew that site, plugin updates were a gamble, and none of the sites shared anything, so the same fix got made four or five times.

What I built

One pattern, used across the whole portfolio.

Each site is its own repo, built with Astro and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Fast pages, nothing to patch, nothing to log in to.
Shared design and components, so a fix or a new section lands on every site that needs it.
One shared CMS for news. A post is tagged to the sites it belongs on, and each site picks up its own.
Live data instead of copy-paste. The schedule and exhibitor list come straight from the source systems through small serverless functions. One live feed replaced 45 hand-built session cards.
Staging first. Every change goes to a preview URL, gets checked, then gets promoted to live.

How it works

Change request From the show team
Edit in the repo With an AI coding agent doing the heavy lifting
Staging preview Its own URL to check
Review A person approves every change
Live Minutes after approval

The result

Five sites moved in under three months. 150 news posts came across, and redirects kept 100 of the 109 URLs search engines had indexed, so almost every link from search kept working. Content changes that used to wait now ship the same day, with no build costs.