Moving my blog from Gatsby to Astro

After using Gatsby for my blog for a while, I decided to switch to Astro for several reasons. In this post, I will share why I made this decision.

First, let me start by saying that Gatsby is a great static site generator. It has a vibrant community, a rich ecosystem of plugins and themes, and impressive performance out of the box. I was able to quickly set up my blog and start publishing content with minimal effort. We’re using Gatsby for our website at Frontify as well, so I’m quite familiar with it.

However, working as a web developer (or more precisely, having worked in this field – as I’m now working in Developer Relations), my goal is to try to create an as-fast-as-possible experience for my visitors. And while Gatsby is doing a great job, it always irked me that it relies so heavily on JavaScript, even for something as simple as this blog.

On the other hand, Astro is a new and emerging static site generator that promises to solve these issues. It has a modern architecture and a flexible plugin system that allows me to focus on the content, and the build process takes care of optimizing everything, with as little JavaScript as possible. It also has a strong focus on compatibility and stability, which means that I don’t have to worry about breaking changes or version conflicts in the future.

With these things in mind, and my quest to try out new things, I decided to move my blog to Astro. And you can’t just do such a move without thinking about the design as well now, can you? So I took the opportunity to revamp the look as well.

I hope you like the new design and can feel the performance improvements 😉

If you want to check out the code, the repository is public on Github.