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A bakery does not need WordPress. A law firm does not need Squarespace. A plumber does not need Wix. They need 5-10 pages that load fast, rank locally, and cost nothing to maintain. Wire builds static HTML from markdown and deploys to free hosting. The bot keeps content from going stale.
The real cost of a local business website
Local businesses pay $50-300 per month for hosting and maintenance through agencies or website builders. A 2026 benchmark by leavewp.com puts WordPress total cost of ownership at $2,000 to $6,000 per year versus $15 to $855 for static sites. The site is usually a WordPress theme from 2020 with stock photos. Nobody updates the content. The "About" page still mentions the previous owner. The services page lists offerings they stopped providing two years ago. Google Business Profile gets updated. The website does not.
The cost problem is compounded by a visibility problem. According to Nectiv (October 2025), 59% of local search prompts trigger a ChatGPT web search, the highest rate of any intent type. Yet only 7.9% of local searches produce an AI Overview (Ahrefs, November 2025). That gap is an opportunity: local businesses with fast, structured, current pages get AI-driven visibility without competing against Google's own generated answers.
The catch is that most pages never make it into a citation. AirOps (March 2026) found that ChatGPT cites only 15% of pages it retrieves; 85% are discarded. The deciding factors are measurable: page speed under 0.4 seconds, content updated within three months, and heading sections of 120 to 180 words. Wire enforces all three at build time.
How Wire fits a local business
Wire reduces a local business website to what it actually is: a handful of pages that need to be correct and current.
Static hosting on GitHub Pages, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages costs nothing. No database, no PHP, no attack surface. Static HTML has an inherent speed advantage over CMS-rendered pages. SE Ranking (November 2025) found that pages with First Contentful Paint under 0.4 seconds receive 3x more ChatGPT citations than pages loading over 1.13 seconds. Wire's output meets that threshold without configuration.
Content freshness is enforced through the date frontmatter field and the refine pipeline. SE Ranking (November 2025) found that pages updated within three months average 6 AI citations versus 3.6 for outdated pages. Wire's news command monitors the local industry for developments. A plumber's emergency services page gets updated when local building codes change. The "About" page does not drift.
Wire's heading-level validation enforces the 120 to 180 word section intervals that SE Ranking found produce 70% more ChatGPT citations than pages with sections under 50 words. Growth Memo (February 2026) found that the first 30% of page text accounts for 44.2% of all LLM citations. Wire's build gates flag thin openings before the site goes live.
Quality checks catch phone numbers, addresses, and business hours that drift out of sync with structured data. Broken links to booking pages fail at build time, not after a customer clicks them. See build verification for the full list of checks Wire runs on every deploy.
What to configure
wire.yml
site_name: "Joe's Plumbing"
site_url: https://joesplumbing.com
lang: en
nav:
- index.md
- Services: services/index.md
- About: about/index.md
- Contact: contact/index.md
See configuration for all wire.yml options and custom site behavior.
Homepage
Use layout: landing for the homepage, the same landing page pattern Wire uses for SaaS sites. The :::testimonial shortcode handles customer reviews. The :::stats shortcode handles business metrics: years in business, jobs completed, service area radius. These are the numbers that appear in the first 30% of the page, where LLM citation weight is highest.
Components for local SEO
Wire provides shortcodes for local SEO. :::faq handles "Do you service my area?" type questions and generates FAQ rich snippets. :::cards organizes service categories. :::cta drives booking links. JSON-LD LocalBusiness schema is added via a template override. Wire generates the sitemap for Google Business Profile integration automatically.
For businesses serving multilingual communities: Weglot (October 2025) found that translated sites gain 327% more visibility in AI Overviews versus untranslated. Wire's multi-language content hub build pipeline makes this accessible without a separate CMS.
What Wire does not handle
Wire generates the sitemap, robots.txt, JSON-LD schema, Open Graph tags, responsive layout, search index, llms.txt, and sub-second load times. The entire site deploys from a single git push. This is the same infrastructure that powers a company homepage, scaled down to 5-10 pages.
Wire does not handle appointment booking, payment processing, or customer portals. For booking, embed Calendly or Acuity. For payments, use Stripe payment links. Walmart's data (Search Engine Land, March 2026) confirms why this separation matters: purchases via ChatGPT Instant Checkout convert 3x lower than click-through purchases to an owned page. The site is the revenue engine. AI search is the front door. Transactions happen on your terms, not an intermediary's.
Getting started
Run python -m wire.init and fill in business details. Write your homepage, services page, about page, and contact page. Add :::testimonial and :::faq shortcodes. Run python -m wire.build and deploy to GitHub Pages.
Total monthly cost: $0, or $10 per year for a custom domain.
See all Wire use cases for more patterns.