A conversation about a new site almost always starts with one question: “so what will you build it on?” The short answer is Astro. What usually follows is a request to explain, because three obvious alternatives are standing right there: a website builder, WordPress, and a grown-up JavaScript framework such as Next.js. Below is what makes Astro better than each of them — and the cases where it is not the one to pick.

What a static site is

A site on Astro is a set of HTML pages built in advance. At the moment a visitor opens a page, nothing is computed: the server hands over a finished file. No database, no PHP or Node assembling the page on the fly, no admin panel sitting exposed to the internet around the clock.

Three consequences, and none of them are about technology — they are about money and peace of mind:

• Speed. Handing over a file is faster than assembling a page. It shows up in your analytics and in search, where speed is part of how a page is scored.
• Security. There is no database and no executable code on the server, so there is nothing to break into and nothing to update for the sake of the latest vulnerability.
• Cost. Any hosting can serve static files. What remains is the domain and the hosting — a few hundred roubles a month, not a subscription that grows along with your traffic.

Website builders: cheap to start, expensive to continue

Tilda and platforms like it have one honest advantage: you can put a page together in an evening and without a developer. While the site is a single page about a single service, a builder is often genuinely the best answer.

The problems start later, and they are all the same problem — the site is rented, not owned:

• The payment is monthly and open-ended. Stop paying and the site goes dark.
• The code belongs to the platform. Export is not offered everywhere or on every plan, and the exported files still need somebody to deploy and maintain them.
• The page is built out of somebody else’s blocks. What “falls outside the block” is precisely what clients come to me for.
• Speed runs into the platform’s shared script: a page made of prebuilt blocks pulls all of them in, not only the ones it uses.

A site on Astro changes that arithmetic: the work is one-off, the hosting is hundreds of roubles a month, and the code and the domain are in the owner’s name.

WordPress: an admin panel at the price of maintenance

WordPress still holds an enormous share of the market, and not without reason: a familiar admin panel, thousands of themes and plugins, and no trouble finding someone to work on it. The price is a running system that has to be looked after.

• Everything needs updating: the core, the theme and every plugin — and on time.
• A plugin is somebody else’s code, executing on your server with full rights. Out-of-date plugins are the most common way small-business sites get broken into.
• Speed is achieved with caching plugins, which is to say another subsystem that also has to be configured and maintained.
• Hosting with PHP and a database costs more than serving files.

The most common way people describe it when they come to me: “the site was built a long time ago, updating it is frightening, and the contractor is nowhere to be found.” That state is not the result of bad work — it is the natural end point of running a system on a server that nobody maintains.

One clarification, because people expect it: the admin panel does not go anywhere. A site on Astro is built together with a CMS — the editor opens in a browser, the owner changes a piece of text, a price or a photograph and presses Save. The edit goes into the repository, the site rebuilds itself, and a minute later the change is published. The difference from WordPress is that the editor does not live on the production server next to the site, and cannot bring it down. What it looks like is on the demonstration site sb.sourcemap.ru.

Next.js and other frameworks: a server where none is needed

Next.js is an excellent tool, and for a client portal, a search or a cart it is exactly what I reach for. For a services site it brings along the things you pay for afterwards: a server runtime that has to be hosted, updated and monitored, and a noticeable amount of JavaScript sent to the visitor for pages that could have been plain markup. The browser receives finished HTML, and then builds the same tree a second time in JavaScript.

Astro works the other way round. By default zero kilobytes of JavaScript reach the browser, and interactivity is added as islands: an enquiry form, a slider or a calculator each come alive on their own, and everything else on the page stays static.

Two practical consequences its neighbours do not have:

• An island can be written in any framework — React, Vue, Svelte, Solid — and they coexist on the same page. It is a rare case where the choice of tool is not made once and for all: an existing component from another project moves across as it is.
• Static is not a dead end. If a server side turns out to be needed later, Astro has a server rendering mode and adapters for Node. There is no rewriting the site from scratch for the sake of one dynamic page.

Hugo, Jekyll and 11ty: the same static, a different tool

These are the closest neighbours, and the argument with them is not about static — that part is identical. On very large sites Hugo builds faster, and that is an honest advantage.

The difference is in what the project itself is made of:

• Go or Liquid templates instead of components and TypeScript. A typo in a variable name is discovered on the finished page rather than at build time.
• Interactivity is added by hand, as a separate script, outside the component system.
• The shape of the content is not described anywhere. In Astro a collection has a schema: if a post is missing its title, its date or its image, the build fails with a clear error instead of publishing a broken page.

On top of that come the things other generators add through plugins of varying freshness: image optimization, sitemaps, RSS and routing for a second language are part of the framework itself.

In one table

When not to choose Astro

Four situations where I honestly say “not me” or “not with this tool”:

• You need one page by tomorrow for a few thousand roubles. A builder is faster and cheaper, and that is a perfectly good answer.
• You need a client portal, roles and user data. That is an application: Node.js and Next.js, with a static site standing alongside it as a shop window at best.
• You need a store with payment and delivery. A separate story and a separate tool — there is a separate article about it.
• The company already has someone who lives in WordPress. There is no point changing tools for the sake of changing tools.

In the end

Astro wins not on abstract “performance” but on what happens to the site after launch. The speed comes for free, there is nothing on the server to maintain, there is no monthly platform fee, and the code and the domain are in the owner’s name — so any other developer can carry on from where I stopped.

What such a site includes and how long it takes is on the Websites service page. If you would rather talk about your own project straight away, write to me — the review is free.