Why I Rebuilt My Site with Astro

astroweb developmentjavascript

After trying various frameworks for my personal site, I finally settled on Astro. Here’s why it works so well for me.

The Problem with SPAs

Single Page Applications are great for complex web apps, but for a portfolio or blog? They’re overkill. You end up shipping megabytes of JavaScript just to display some text and images.

Enter Astro

Astro takes a different approach:

  • Zero JavaScript by default - Ship HTML and CSS, add JS only where needed
  • Component Islands - Interactive components hydrate independently
  • Content Collections - First-class support for Markdown and MDX
  • Framework Agnostic - Use React, Vue, Svelte, or plain HTML

My Setup

For this site, I’m using:

// astro.config.mjs
export default defineConfig({
  site: "https://bernardmcweeney.com",
  integrations: [sitemap()],
  adapter: cloudflare(),
});

The result? A fast, lightweight site that scores well on Core Web Vitals and is a joy to maintain.

Conclusion

If you’re building a content-focused website, give Astro a try. It might just change how you think about web development.

← Back to Blog