Astro For Fast, Custom Websites
Unparalleled Performance and Reliability for Delivering Content
When faced with building a modern website that is content-focused, Astro is an easy framework choice to make. The features and benefits of Astro make for a compelling option when balancing page performance, great SEO, reliability, and hosting cost considerations.
Most websites are content-focused, and should prioritize performance for the best user experience possible. Often web frameworks and CMS platforms are built for many more functions beyond content; and those extra features can quickly add bloat, slowing the site down, causing frustrating editing experiences, and potentially cause users to abandon the site altogether.
About Astro
Astro has been taking the web development world by storm, being rated #1 in developer interest and retention in the State of JS survey for the last few years. Because of its architecture and design, the framework gets out of the way of content authors, while quietly providing HTML-focused templating and optimizations that make working with it a delight for developers, authors, and end users.
Astro Features and Benefits
Astro’s popularity is not surprising, due to its HTML-first approach which prioritizes getting content to users’ devices fast, rather than having to wait for JavaScript from a heavy framework. In fact, typical usage of Astro will create pages that don’t include any JavaScript at all. In contrast to weightier frameworks, Astro requires opting in to dynamic features, rather than shipping megabytes of scripts just in case they’re needed.
However, Astro is also built from the ground up to integrate with those dynamic frameworks where they’re desired. Using an island architecture that lets sections of a page become dynamic, Astro includes built-in support for popular libraries like React, Svelte, Vue, and can even support Elm.
Why Astro?
At Engage, we’ve been reaching for Astro more and more in order to simplify our deployment and reduce our hosting costs, while creating sites that are much more efficient. Working within a developer focused framework, we also benefit from the fast-by-default approach that Astro follows, making our content delivery nimble and easy to iterate upon. Following a content-driven approach aligns well with our commitment to creating positive, memorable user experiences.