Why We Moved Our Own Website Off GoHighLevel

For two years, thebackyardbougie.com lived inside GoHighLevel. That made sense at the time — we run our CRM, automations, and client sub-accounts in GHL, and keeping the marketing site there meant one fewer system to manage.

The problem is that we sell websites. And the website we were selling from didn’t match the standard we deliver to clients.

What broke

A few things, all at once:

• Performance. GHL ships a fixed payload regardless of what the page actually needs. Lighthouse Performance scores hovered in the mid-70s on mobile no matter what we trimmed.
• Accessibility ceilings. Our internal Accessibility Operating Standard targets WCAG 2.1 AA. Two known GHL widget bugs — the multi-select form control and reCAPTCHA — meant we couldn’t ship without disclosed exceptions. That’s fine for clients who choose Tier 2, but it’s not the posture we want on our own shop window.
• Schema injection. We wrote nine careful JSON-LD blocks for our Organization, LocalBusiness, services, and people. GHL kept inconsistently injecting them per page, which neutralized half the SEO work.
• Design control. GHL’s builder is fast for clients. It’s slow when you want to push typography, layout, and interaction into editorial territory.

What we moved to

Astro on Hostinger. Specifically:

• Astro 5 with content collections for blog, podcast, and work
• Tailwind v4 with brand tokens locked in CSS custom properties
• Hostinger static hosting — deployed via flat-zipped build artifact uploaded through MCP
• Zero-JavaScript-by-default architecture so most pages ship as pure HTML

The build is open-source-stack, no platform lock-in, and the deploy step is a single command.

What we learned

Three things, in order of importance:

1. The shop window has to outperform what you sell. If we tell clients our standard is WCAG 2.1 AA with no third-party exceptions and sub-1s LCP, our own site has to clear that bar without apology.
2. Static doesn’t mean static. Astro lets us ship a static site with islands of interactivity exactly where they earn it — and nowhere else.
3. Build platform is a sales asset. When a prospective client asks why our site loads instantly and theirs doesn’t, the answer is no longer “we’re using the same tool you are.”

What’s next

Self-hosted fonts, real photography, and a quarterly accessibility re-audit on the new build. The Tier 1 build standard documented in our Accessibility Statement is what we’ll ship under from here forward — for us and for every client we onboard onto Astro.

If you’re considering the same move, book a call. We’ve now lived through the migration we used to recommend — and we’re happier on the other side of it.