How to set up an agentic website: one AI builds it, you run it by telling it what to change

For years, running a website meant logging into WordPress, clicking around, updating plugins, and hoping nothing broke.

I’ve been moving to a different setup. The site is built with AI, and I run it by telling AI what to change instead of editing pages by hand. I’ve started calling it an agentic website. It sounds fancy, but it’s pretty simple in practice, and it’s saved me a lot of time.

This is an experiment I’m running in the open, so I’ll keep updating it as I go. Here’s what I mean, how I set it up, and the part everyone worries about: not losing your Google traffic.

Two ways to run a website: the old WordPress way of logging in and babysitting, versus the agentic way of telling AI what to change

What an “agentic website” actually is

Two pieces:

  1. It’s built as a fast, simple site (in my case with a framework called Astro), not a heavy CMS with a database and a pile of plugins.
  2. You run it by talking to AI. When I want to change something, I tell Claude Code what to do and it makes the change. No dashboard, no plugin hunting.

An agentic website is two pieces: a fast simple site built with Astro, and running it by talking to AI

The clearest example for me is an events page I have. The events change constantly. In WordPress, updating all of that was a pain. Now I just tell Claude Code the events and it updates them. I don’t touch the pages myself. That’s the agentic part, and once you feel it, it’s hard to go back.

Step 1: Move off the heavy CMS (WordPress to Astro)

To be clear, I still like WordPress. This isn’t a “WordPress is dead” thing. But for a site you want to be fast and easy to update with AI, a lighter setup just works better.

I rebuild the site in Astro and host it on Vercel. The sites come out blazing fast, mobile works right out of the box, and there’s almost no day to day maintenance. No plugins getting outdated and breaking things.

I wrote up why I started doing this here: Why I started moving my sites from WordPress to Astro.

Step 2: Migrate without losing your SEO traffic

This is the part that scared me most, and it’s what stops most people. If you’ve got rankings and traffic, you don’t want to wreck them.

The rule that protects you is simple: rebuild the new site as an exact copy of the old one first. Same pages, same content, same URLs. If it’s a near-identical copy, there’s very little for Google to penalize.

The things that actually cause traffic loss, and what to do about each:

  • URLs change. Match every URL exactly. This is the number one way people lose rankings.
  • Redirects get missed. Set up 301 redirects for anything that does change (old category, author, and feed URLs).
  • Meta titles and descriptions reset. Bring them over exactly, don’t let them default.
  • Schema and internal links disappear. Keep your structured data, and make sure every internal link still works.
  • Sitemap and robots.txt. Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console, and double check robots.txt isn’t blocking anything.

Migrate without losing rankings: rebuild the new site as an exact copy first, then match URLs, set 301 redirects, keep meta and schema, and resubmit the sitemap

The way I get through all that is with Claude Code, comparing the old site to the new build page by page. The honest truth is it takes several passes, each one catches something the last missed, and it’s still not perfect. But on the sites I’ve moved, I didn’t lose traffic. It held and then climbed. I put the whole thing in my full migration checklist.

Step 3: Let AI run it

Once it’s live, this is where the agentic part pays off. To update the site, I tell Claude Code what I want. A friend of mine does the same with Codex, which comes with the $20/month ChatGPT plan.

That means marketing changes happen fast. New page, updated copy, a fresh events list, all done by asking. No waiting on a developer, no fighting a page builder.

What you need to set one up

  • A framework: Astro. There’s a free version.
  • Hosting: I use Vercel.
  • An AI tool to build and update it: Claude Code, or Codex if you’re on ChatGPT.

Is this for you?

If you’ve got a smaller site and you like getting into the weeds, you can set this up yourself. Try it on a small or test site first and see how it feels.

If it’s a bigger, established site where the traffic really matters, one missed step in the migration can cost you. If you’d rather not risk it, I help businesses move off WordPress and set them up so AI runs the site, with the SEO handled so the rankings come with you.

Either way, that’s the whole idea: a fast site, built with AI, that you run by talking to it instead of babysitting it.

The write-ups

I’m breaking the details into separate posts as I go. Here’s what’s covered so far.