Matt Lawrence

Matt Lawrence

VP of Software Engineering
@ WP Engine

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Confessions of a Barefoot Cobbler Rebuilding my website and workflow

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Matt Lawrence

Cobbler’s Paradox is a specific irony where one’s professional expertise in a field leads to the total neglect of that same thing in one’s personal life. A cobbler spends all day crafting footwear for customers, yet doesn’t have time to do the same for their own feet or their children’s feet.

This has applied to my website for years; it was often used just to play with alpha and beta software filled with Lorem Ipsum. The irony of this is that I work at WP Engine, which powers more than a few digital experiences. Prior to the acquisition of StudioPress, I worked alongside some extremely talented copywriters at Copyblogger.

By now, you may have put together the context clues and guessed that the rest of this post will be about fixing this by… rebuilding the website and workflow. Think of it as a series of mini-hackathons carved out of the quiet hours after the house settles down. Once my daughter is tucked in, easily the best shift of my day, and before I head to bed while the reality TV plays.

The Goals:

  • Ability to use WordPress as the editor on my local machine (without needing an internet connection).
  • A workflow to push what I create locally in WordPress to a static site (since my site needs are extremely basic).
  • AI, GEO, and SEO friendly.

The Workflow: I use Local by WP Engine for running WordPress on my local machine. I’ve optimized the site for performance and discovery using:

The Deployment:

  1. Staatic crawls the WordPress site running in Local and exports the HTML/CSS/JS to my machine.
  2. Local to Pages (built with Claude Code) takes this content, generates a sitemap, llms.txt, and security headers, then hands it off to Wrangler.
  3. Wrangler pushes it to Cloudflare Pages, where it is served globally as a static website.

If you’re keeping track, all three original goals were achieved. Learning alongside my ‘friends’ Claude Code and Gemini while solving my own personal 1% use case has been an absolute blast.