Why We Moved Our Marketing Site From DNN to Astro
Our primary marketing website, engagesoftware.com, has been built upon the DNN Platform for more than a decade. After redesigning the content and flow of the site at the beginning of the year, we realized that we weren’t really using much of the functionality that DNN provided. In concert with some other work to move toward static sites, we started a small project to see what would happen if we migrated off of DNN and onto Astro. This is the story of that migration.
Why Not Stay on DNN
Engage has been a pillar of the DNN community for decades, so of course we built our website on DNN. Especially when we were module vendors, we had custom and dynamic functionality that made use of DNN’s features (e.g. support forums and store integrations). However, the current iteration of our site was little more than a collection of HTML. The most complicated part was the blog, and we weren’t terribly happy with how it worked in the first place.
Moreover, Engage is a team full of expert web developers, so while our clients and partners often find a friendly interface easier to work with when managing content, for us it often got in our way. We’re all comfortable taking full advantage of the features of HTML and CSS, so having a tool which operates at that level is actually a breath of fresh air for us. That’s not to say that using Astro necessitates giving up those friendly interfaces; if necessary, they will become part of a headless CMS feeding content into Astro.
The Benefits of Astro
One of the most compelling benefits that pushed us to consider an Astro version of the site was performance. If we could eliminate a step in the process of serving a web page, how much benefit would we see? As just one example, one of the pages had a Largest Contentful Paint time drop from 10 seconds to 2 seconds.
In addition to pre-rendering the HTML, moving off of DNN allows us to have more control over the markup, giving us the option to remove a number of resources which weren’t required to view the content. Because all of the HTML is right there to tweak, it’s also led to incremental cleanup throughout our regular maintenance activities. When a couple of accessibility issues were flagged while running WebPageTest, it was straightforward to resolve them.
Aside from the performance benefits intrinsic to serving static content, Astro has many performance-focused features. Regarding performance, the Astro docs state, “Our goal: It should be nearly impossible to build a slow website with Astro.” Specifically, image optimization was a major enhancement we opted into. Astro’s image handling makes it simple to serve optimized images that are the right size for the screen and include HTML attributes to optimize the loading and decoding of the images based on their priority.
What a Migration Looks Like
After the site’s redesign, we had less than fifteen main pages to migrate. So it was simple to convert the DNN theme into an Astro layout, copy the HTML from each DNN page into an Astro page file, and then enable image optimizations. However, while we hope the vast majority of the visitors to our site are using those newly designed pages, the reality is that there are old pages, as well as redirects, present within DNN that still receive traffic and need to be accounted for in a migration. All of the technical details of migrating the rest of the content is available in the companion post, How to Migrate from DNN to Astro.
Conclusion
Despite decades of experience with DNN Platform, we realized it made more sense for our marketing website to use simpler technologies, and found major performance benefits from adopting Astro.