In March 2022, xaweho launched as a brand of its own. Four years later, it’s time the shop window matched the current state of things. The old WordPress site served us well for a long time, but over the years it had become exactly what we like to help our own customers avoid: sluggish, with too many plugins, too many update cycles, too much friction between “wanting to change something” and “being able to change something”.
So we rebuilt the website from scratch. The occasion was the birthday — the reason was: the result should carry what we do every day.
What runs under the hood
The new xaweho.de is a purely static site. There’s no PHP process querying a database on every visit and assembling the HTML. Instead, all 196 pages are generated once, up front, and then sit on the server as finished HTML files. Apache serves them — that’s it.
That makes the site noticeably faster, more robust and more secure:
- Performance — a pre-rendered HTML file is delivered in milliseconds. No PHP, no MySQL query, no plugin taking a moment to think.
- Security — where no WordPress runs, there’s no WordPress exploit. The most common attack surface is simply gone.
- Updates without drama — no plugin update can break anything, because there are no plugins. Changes happen in code, get tested locally, then go live.
The tech stack — for the curious
We rely on a small set of modern, well-matched tools:
- Astro as the static site generator. Astro is a generation of web frameworks that explicitly bets on speed and “no JavaScript unless necessary”. Components are written in a JSX-like syntax, but the output is still static HTML.
- Tailwind CSS 4 for styling. Instead of a sprawling design-system library, we write CSS directly from utility classes — which keeps the shipped CSS very small, because unused classes are removed automatically.
- YAML files for the product data — plans, features, FAQs live as structured data files in the Git repo. Changes are versioned, traceable, and can be reviewed in a pull request before they go live.
- Markdown for the content — knowledge base articles and this very newsroom are ordinary Markdown files. Writing without clicking through a UI.
- Pagefind as the search engine for the knowledge base. Search runs entirely in the browser, no external API, no tracking. The search index is generated during the build.
- Plesk hosting — the site runs with us, of course, in one of our German data centers. Eat your own dogfood.
Deployment is a classic rsync from the local build environment to the
server. No CI/CD overkill for 196 static files — it doesn’t get leaner than
that.
What you’ll notice as a visitor
Most of the improvements are invisible — they happen in the milliseconds between click and page render. What you’ll see directly:
- Fast page loads. Click a link, the new page is there.
- Consistent plan overviews. Every plan has a spec table, an FAQ, and an order link straight to the right entry in the customer center.
- A real knowledge base with search, instead of the handful of old HelpDocs snippets.
- Service agreements per product — what we concretely deliver, what you as a customer take care of, and what’s not possible. Written out in plain terms, not buried in the fine print.
What’s next
In this newsroom, you’ll read at irregular intervals what’s happening here: product updates, maintenance windows, price adjustments, occasionally an open post-mortem when something goes wrong. Little advertising, plenty of substance — the way we like to read it ourselves.
Thanks for the first four years. Here’s to the next.