I Rebuilt My Personal Site with Astro and I'm Not Going Back

We recently used Astro at work for a project, and it was new to me. I’d heard about it before but brushed it off as just another framework — one of many that keep coming out like Marvel movies.

I was wrong.

What won me over was the simplicity. Using it felt like going back to basics: plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, just with types. No mental overhead, no framework-specific patterns to memorise. It took a couple of hours to feel at home, and by the end of the project I’d already decided to rewrite my personal site with it.

The biggest win was JavaScript bundle size. Astro’s island architecture only ships JS for the components that actually need it. Since my site barely uses any interactivity, the homepage went from around 2.5mb down to roughly 22kb. That’s not a typo.

I also dropped Tailwind. Utility classes are convenient — you skip the whole “what do I name this class” problem — but I found myself reaching for a lot of them just to do things a few lines of scoped CSS could handle more cleanly. With Astro’s component-scoped styles, the naming problem mostly goes away on its own.

The last thing to go was Sanity. My previous site used it as a CMS, but I was only using maybe 20% of what it offered. Switching to plain Markdown files turned out to be the right call — writing in Neovim and committing to git feels a lot more natural than a browser-based editor.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with the result.