How Everyday Media Group halved its dev time with Astro, Claude, and CloudCannon
Ryan Nielsen
Director of Product Development and Innovation
Everyday Media Group
2x
faster development
90–99
PageSpeed scores across mobile and desktop by default
Everyday Media Group is a full-service digital marketing agency in Southlake, Texas, serving businesses across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Home services makes up the bulk of the client list, mostly roofers, contractors and trades, alongside a heavy concentration of real estate investors and a scattering of other verticals. Ryan Nielsen leads a team of four devs, who between them run SEO, Google Ads, paid social, and the websites all of that traffic lands on.
Ryan signed up for CloudCannon in 2019, well before any of this had anything to do with AI. What he wanted was client sites that arrived fast and stayed fast, so that performance became something the agency could take for granted rather than something it had to defend every time a new contractor ran a report. Static output gave him that, and the team started deploying Jekyll sites. A few of those builds are still live today, and still performing well.
WordPress sites kept getting built alongside Jekyll for a while, mostly because it was what clients already knew and the easiest thing to explain. What tipped the balance was how much a small team could produce, and the availability of better tooling: "When the production advantages of using something like Astro really became apparent, we really leaned into it hard."
What breaks at 130 WordPress sites
At its peak, Everyday Media Group was managing somewhere between 120 and 130 WordPress websites. Managed hosts can help smooth out plenty of the pain at that volume, and Ryan is quick to say so. What they can’t fix is what happens at the SMB and mid-market level when a site changes hands. Say, for example, when a previous agency builds a site, installing a stack of premium themes and plugins to get it done, then the relationship changes, the client moves on, and the licenses have to move with them.
Underneath that friction sat a permanent maintenance grind. Someone on the team always needed to know whether WordPress core was up to date, whether the themes and plugins had been patched, and where the agency’s exposure sat that week. Then a batch of client sites got hacked, and two or three development days disappeared into restoring backups and working out what had happened.
I’m romantic about WordPress. I started my career with it, writing plugins, writing themes, helping agencies. It’s such a big backbone of the internet. But it has a huge attack surface. After that whole nightmare, I just thought: none of this would have happened if these people had been on Jekyll, on CloudCannon. This story would never happen.
A static site on CloudCannon collapses that surface area to almost nothing. There’s no database to compromise and no plugin chain to keep patched, and the only meaningful account left to protect is the CloudCannon one, which Ryan is quick to note is the same exposure he already carried with a managed WordPress host.
Why Astro replaced Jekyll
When the agency finally committed to static across the board, Ryan took another look at the generator underneath it. Ruby wasn’t the direction he wanted to take the team, and not because of any technical fault with it. JavaScript was simply a better bet for his developers’ careers and an easier skill set to hire around, which made Astro the more sensible choice.
The other half of the shift was AI. Ryan uses Claude heavily, and having the entire site sit locally as a folder of files changed what his development work felt like: "If I can have the whole site local and work on it in natural language, that’s so much better than the database dependency and everything else that makes it a little bit harder."
Six to eight weeks became two to four
A WordPress build used to take the agency six to eight weeks from kickoff to handover. On Astro and CloudCannon, with Claude along for the ride, it now takes two to four. Most of that gain comes from removing handoffs rather than from anything in the code itself.
I don’t need as many specialists trading it around as I did before. It allows me to function as a strategist. I can tell Claude I don’t like something, and I’ll tell it again, and I don’t have to filter everything I’m thinking through the prism of four other people to get the outcome I want.
Ryan starts each project by handing Claude a set of directives that reads closer to a house rulebook than a component library. He works through typography and design primitives first, then the UI components, then the photography, sorting the images by where the strongest ones should sit. Many of these builds are WordPress conversions rather than greenfield work, which gives him a chance to fix designs that had drifted into a single wall of text with a CTA at the bottom.
Right now he and his devs are busy, because they’re actively involved in so many client migrations to CloudCannon. Once the dust settles from the migrations, he’s expecting the site maintenance side of their work to drop away, leaving everyone with more time to focus on new builds and maintain their excellent customer satisfaction ratings.
Whichever way a client wants to work
For Everyday Media Group, a new site build is the front door to a longer marketing relationship with clients. In fact, that’s where the value sits for both sides, so the team builds ongoing support into its work, instead of handing over a site and walking away.
For clients who would rather be at work than behind a computer, this is ideal. Any content change requests are live within one to two business days, and often a good deal faster than that.
That service model shapes how the agency uses CloudCannon. Some clients want to be in the site themselves. Others would rather hand changes to the team. But because every new project ships on CloudCannon, Ryan doesn’t have to know which kind of client he has before he starts.
We like that CloudCannon is there as a sort of insurance policy for projects where somebody has more expectations. We don’t have to run out and find a solution. We integrate the CMS and they can edit their content.
For any client with a DIY instinct, the whole pitch fits in a sentence: it won’t be that different from WordPress, you’ll still be able to edit your content, and nobody is taking control away from you.
Green is good
New Astro sites on CloudCannon now easily land in the mid 90s on PageSpeed Insights across mobile and desktop, and Ryan is content to stop there. He doesn’t think page speed is a silver bullet for organic positioning, though he does believe it matters a great deal in paid media. What interests him most is whether the score is good enough for the people actually using the site, rather than how close it can be pushed to a perfect hundred.
At some point, he says, the real question is whether the end user — the customer looking for a roofer, or a local contractor — is actually having a problem.
On WordPress, 90 was a number the agency had to build and then defend. It meant stacking caching plugins on top of whatever themes and plugins the site already ran, tuning them so they didn’t fight each other, and then keeping that arrangement working through every core, theme and plugin update that followed. With Astro and CloudCannon a 90 is an easy win, which means devs are freed from maintenance work, and they can spend their time and attention on the additional marketing work the client came for.
What’s next
Ryan is currently rebuilding Everyday Media Group’s own site in Astro, where he can test out as many of CloudCannon’s features as possible. Editable regions, where non-technical clients can click straight onto the page and key in their changes, are on the top of his list.
He’s also picking up the tooling that’s landed since. CloudCannon’s agent skills give Claude the context it needs to set up an Astro project with visual editing configured properly, which should put an end to Claude’s odd assumptions about formatting for redirects. The new CLI and local dev server will let him spin up CloudCannon locally and see exactly what an editor will see, without pushing a commit and waiting on a build to find out. For an agency of four devs managing a portfolio this size, there are a lot of iterations, and small savings on every iteration will add up fast.
The larger gain, though, is in the workload that no longer exists. Nobody schedules core updates, nobody chases plugin licenses when a client changes hands, and nobody loses days to restoring backups. Sites ship in half the time they used to, arrive fast, and stay fast without anyone tending them.
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Tom Richardson
Solutions Architect
