Smart marketers are moving their websites to hard code, here’s why
why teams are making this shift, what it enables, and what's next
Some of the smartest marketers I know are migrating their websites off of a CMS and moving to hard code.
Today we’ll be unpacking this trend. This is a <5min read, w. links to more resources to dive deeper at the end. It covers:
What they’re doing & why.
How to migrate.
What they’re doing with a hardcoded website.
What’s next.
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What they’re doing & why
Website work (updating backlinks, fixing forms, refreshing content, updating branding) is perfect for agents but agents get stuck when working with traditional CMSs.
But if your website is hardcoded, agents can do everything… identify, plan, ship, iterate. Which means you can:
Do stuff that never got off the backlog. Fixing broken links, updating internal linking, refreshing old-but-good content, cleaning up technical SEO.
Ship new work 10x faster. Shipping new landing pages, running experiments, programmatic SEO pages & experiments.
Push sitewide updates in a day. Recurring scheduled tasks, and one time work like branding updates, product changes, etc.
The biggest unlock here is speed, but people have also mentioned meaningful improvements in performance. Sentry’s Web Vitals score went from 89 to 97, and they 4x’d their conversion rate. StackOne’s Mobile Lighthouse went from 42 to 92.
How to migrate
Simple answer: you need dev support.
Beyond that, the details and scope vary by company & website complexity. Max and Matt have websites with thousands of pages. It took 1 month w. 1 full time dev and one freelancer, and 2-3 months w. 2 sr devs respectively.
Cursor migrated their (simpler) website in 3 days. Prefect did it in a week. Another marketer in Demand Collective did it in 2 weeks with one dev running it. Everyone had dev support.
What they’re doing with a hardcoded website
Honestly… kinda anything you want. It’s less about what and more about now, what used to take 2 weeks can take 30 minutes.
You can also publish new work you never would have attempted before:
Chris Shuptrine, VPMktg @ Torii, built programmatic landing pages for long tail keywords that were better and cheaper than a contractor.
Matt from Sentry built a “Chat with Docs” widget to go on all landing pages
Guillaume from StackOne built a floating TOC with share buttons to the blog layout
Max from Alchemy built a skill that determines the best contextual CTA for each blog post and updates across his website.
Adam from Prefect lets anyone on their team drop website updates in their #website channel with a high-fidelity description of what they want. That sends it to Linear. Then they use Devin to do a first pass and triage. It’s been able to land pretty good changes out of the gate.
There are hundreds of ideas like this that are possible in a world where agents can execute on the full loop.
Now you can actually do them.
Who this is for, and who it isn’t (?)
I don’t want to say anyone *shouldn’t* do this, it’s up to you. It seems like this is the direction everything is going and even if this isn’t the highest priority initiative for your company, I think it’s still such a valuable learning exercise that will make you more attractive to all these recruiters looking for “AI Native Demand Marketers”
That being said, all the marketers I’ve talked to who have done this either:
Had very large websites & SEO/AEO was a priority. More existing pages = more SEO work that needs to be done = more impact from a high volume of small tweaks. If you’re a resource constrained startup or a gigantic company, this might not be worth it.
Had dev help ready to go. Easier to work with a dev who is already excited about this project than fighting for buy-in to hire help.
Or were relatively technical/AI pilled. For people like Chris from Torii, who built parts of their website in hard code without dev help, This wasn’t the first AI build they attempted on their own.
Resources to go deeper
Some great posts if you want to continue down this rabbit hole:
Matt Henderson from Sentry on why they migrated their marketing site out of a CMS
Coding Agents & Complexity Budgets - Cursor’s migration off a CMS to raw code + Markdown in 3 days for $260 in tokens, and why simpler code makes agents more effective.
Unrelated to this exact topic, but an insanely interesting read about how to get better creative outputs from “atomized inputs”.
We Rebuilt Our Marketing Site with Astro, Claude Code, and Cloudflare. In a couple of evenings. StackOne’s CTO on moving off Webflow. More technical walkthrough.
Rebuilding our website for the agent era. Prefect’s VP Product on their migration. Well written, quick read.
How I migrated off of Webflow in one week with coding agents. Vellum’s growth lead on the Next.js/Sanity/Postgres rebuild, 10x AEO velocity, and ~$30k/yr saved.
I used Claude Code to migrate my WordPress blog in an afternoon. Vercel’s Pauline Narvas moving 367 posts from WordPress to MDX in ~4 hours.
AI Killed The CMS: How I Ditched Mine for Code and Markdown. Swapping WordPress for Astro + Markdown so agents can edit posts directly.
From WordPress to Next.js in 5 Weeks: How We Used Claude Code as a Development Partner. WordPress-to-Next.js rebuild with Claude Code.
Converting a Ghost blog to Next.js and MDX using AI and JavaScript Moving off Ghost to a code-based MDX site with AI.
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A hand-picked core group of 4-6 other marketers solving similar problems to you.
A private slack channel where everyone will be sharing what they're building & learning.
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Thanks so much! Hope you found this one useful :)
Much love ❤️ ,
Eric