AerisForge
The engine behind every site we build.
Every website we make runs on AerisForge, a publishing engine we built ourselves. We made it because the off-the-shelf tools couldn't do what we wanted: deliver large-agency craft and correctness from a small studio, and let clients keep their own site current without ever breaking it.
It isn't magic. It's disciplined engineering aimed at one outcome: your site, done right, and kept that way. Here's what makes it different.
QR codes, generated for you
Add an event and it arrives with its own QR code, ready to drop on a flyer, a slide, or a printed handout. People scan straight there, no long URL to type. Any collection can carry QR codes, not just events, and you never have to make one.
Collections
A team, a list of services, a blog, a calendar of events: each is a single definition that is the data, the search markup, and the form you edit from, all at once. That is how a small studio delivers the range you’d expect from a large agency, without the large-agency cost.
Beautiful social previews, automatically
Share any page — a service, an event, your home page — and it unfurls as a designed, on-brand card, never a broken link. Every page gets one, generated for you.
One photo, sized everywhere
Upload a single master image. It’s cropped to the right focal point and served at the right size for every place it appears, on every device. No fiddling, no blurry thumbnails.
Built to be found
Underneath the design, AerisForge is an SEO and structured-data engine. The technical foundations Google rewards (the ones most sites get wrong) are correct by default, on every page.
Ready for the AI era
Your site speaks the structured language search engines and AI assistants read, so tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity can understand and recommend you, not just skim a wall of text.
No database
Your site is just files that belong to you. Nothing to hack, nothing to patch, no monthly software license. If you ever left, you’d take everything with you, readable.
One source of truth
The words on the page, the data search engines read, and the social-share preview all come from the same place. They can never disagree, because there’s only one copy.
You can’t break it
Clients edit the words, the events, the staff, the parts that should change. Never the design or the structure. The worst a bad edit can do is fail a safety check before it ever goes live.
It can never go live broken
A risky edit fails a safety check before it ever ships, and the new version is swapped in all at once. There’s no in-between where your visitors catch a half-broken page.
The shortest route between your content and your visitors
In a famous 1977 film, a space pilot bragged that his ship was so fast it completed a smuggling route in less than twelve parsecs.
The funny thing? Parsecs measure distance, not speed.
AerisForge is fast for the same reason.
Most website platforms take the long route. A visitor requests a page, the server wakes up, runs multiple database queries, assembles the content, renders the page, and finally sends it to the browser. Then it does all of that again for the next visitor, even though the content hasn't changed in a week.
All of that takes time. Instead of trying to make that process faster, we take a shorter route.
AerisForge precompiles pages ahead of time and keeps them ready to be served instantly. No database, and the work happens once, when the page changes. There's nothing left to assemble when someone asks.
It turns out the fastest websites aren't always the ones moving at the highest speed. They're the ones traveling the shortest distance.
She's fast enough for you, old man.
We timed 3,093 small-organization websites
Every one a live site, fetched once, measured the same way, running on the platforms small organizations actually use. The slowest took thirty-one seconds to hand over its page. WordPress was the slowest of the common platforms, at a median of 1.77 seconds across 636 sites.
The three sites we run on AerisForge answered cold in about half a second each, measured with the same probe on the same day. That puts all three ahead of roughly three quarters of the sites we checked.
How we measured: one request per site for the page's HTML, not its images or scripts. Every site in the sample is a church, taken from a census we ran across three denominations' own directories — but they run what everyone else runs: 690 Squarespace, 636 WordPress, 333 Wix. Ours were timed on the same machine, the day this was written.
What it's not
Not a page builder. You edit data and content, not fonts and layout, and that's the point: your site still looks like a professional made it, a year and a hundred edits later.
Not lock-in. Your content is your files, and you can walk away with everything, readable, any time you like. No proprietary format, no account needed to open it.
Not magic. Publishing straight from version control is a known idea; developers have done it for years. It stayed a developer's tool because nobody did the work to make it safe for everyone else. That work is what AerisForge does.
Want a site that runs on it?
Every project in our work is built on AerisForge. Let's talk about one of your own.