The Threat Profile of Legacy WordPress Portals
A local nonprofit organization in Anchorage came to us after their WordPress website was compromised for the third time in a single year. Like many legacy setups, they relied on a variety of plugins for contact forms, event calendars, and page design.
A single vulnerable plugin allowed automated bots to breach their site, injecting spam links and causing search engines to flag their domain. To manage this risk, the nonprofit was paying over $120 a month for web firewall subscriptions, malware scanning tools, and developer maintenance retainer plans.
The Solution: Astro Static Reconstruction
To resolve these vulnerabilities once and for all, we rebuilt their website using Astro 6 and hosted it on Cloudflare Pages:
- Remove Server Risks: Rebuilding the site into static HTML removed the PHP execution environment entirely. With no dynamic database on the server, there is nothing for bots to hack.
- Serverless Form Processing: We replaced the vulnerable contact form plugin with a secure Cloudflare Pages Function that routes submissions directly to Google Sheets via API.
- Automated Backups: Code is stored securely in GitHub, with every update automatically deployed to Cloudflare’s edge network, creating a clear history of all changes.
Clean Architecture Results
- Security Incidents: Dropped from three breaches per year to zero.
- Maintenance & Firewall Fees: Reduced from $120/month to $0/month.
- Page Load Times: Improved by 74%, making it easy for users on remote networks to view guides and events.