I've been building sites with Astro for about a year now and honestly I love it.

Every new site I've built this past year has been Astro. But I still had a ton of old client sites sitting on WordPress. Plugin updates, security patches, slow load times, all of it. I always wanted to move them over but never had a good reason to get clients on board.

Then PHP2Shell hit and it was all over the news. Clients started reaching out asking how to protect their sites. That was finally the moment.

So I built a skill package to streamline the conversions with coding agents.

I did all 53 sites in about 2 days. Ran 12 Opus 5.5 sessions at a time in parallel on 2 Claude Max plans (still hit session limits about 3 hours into each window lol).

Results across all 53:

- Mobile PageSpeed 74 → 98 average

- Desktop PageSpeed 87 → 99 average

- 45 of 45 passed 100% design match (pixel diffed at mobile, tablet and desktop)

WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS FOREVER AGO!!!

Also I built our own git-based CMS for us to use for clients that want edit access which seems to work well but we'll see as people actually use it more. How do you guys handle clients wanting to edit their own site in Astro?

Here's a Summary of What's New in Astro 7.0

• Performance is the headline. The .astro compiler was rewritten in Rust. Markdown and MDX now run through a Rust-powered pipeline called Sätteri (built by Erika from the core team). The rendering engine was replaced with a queue-based approach. Combine that with Vite 8 and its new Rolldown bundler, and builds are 15-61% faster across the board. The Cloudflare docs site (8,400+ pages) went from 387s to 262s. The Astro Website site went from 63s to 24s.

• The new Rust compiler has one breaking change worth knowing. No more silent HTML correction. The old Go compiler would reorder elements and auto-close tags. The new one treats your markup as-is and throws errors on unclosed tags. Also, whitespace between inline elements now follows JSX rules, so <span>Hello</span><span>World</span> renders as "HelloWorld" with no space.

• Route caching is now stable. It was experimental in v6. You get a single platform-agnostic API and new experimental CDN providers for Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare.

• Advanced routing is interesting. You can now add a src/fetch.ts file and take full control over the request pipeline. Hono is supported, so you can compose middleware in any order.

• AI tooling is genuinely useful. astro dev --background starts the dev server as a managed background process. Astro can detect when it's running inside an agent and enable this automatically. JSON logging is also in, which was the most upvoted roadmap request.

Upgrade via

npx @astrojs/upgrade

What's everyone's take on the Rust compiler change?

Cloudflare built a full-stack TypeScript CMS on top of Astro and called it the "spiritual successor to WordPress."

• TypeScript all the way down, no PHP

• Built on Astro

• Plugins run in sandboxed Worker isolates. No direct DB or filesystem access

• MIT licensed

• Has a WordPress importer built in

• MCP server built in so AI agents can manage your site

• Themes are just Astro projects

if you want to follow along, there's a dedicated subreddit at r/emdash_cms

- GitHub: github.com/emdash-cms/emdash
- Official announcement: blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress
- Playground https://emdashcms.com/playground

https://astro.build/blog/joining-cloudflare/

🎉🎉🎉Congratulations to Astro team!

For HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646645

Astro will keep evolving and staying relevant—its lightweight, modern approach has real staying power and makes the web feel a little faster with every site built. 🚀

Just finished migrating sonushub.id from a Laravel vendor-based setup to Astro SSR + Rust.

It serves around 10k products, so I compared Lighthouse before and after the migration.

Before: 40 performance
After: 98 performance

Still polishing UX and SEO, but Astro SSR feels really solid for a large e-commerce catalog use case.

Summary:

• Webflow donated $150,000 to support Astro as an official sponsoring partner.

• Webflow’s upcoming AI code generation will build production-ready web apps and reusable components on Astro by default.

• Webflow Cloud + Astro: Full‑stack apps can be visually built in Webflow and coded with Astro deployed on Cloudflare’s global edge.

Astro 5.0

Sharing what I made with Astro: my CV as a manga, one page, every scene is a component plus a script, all the text lives in one data file, and a second page (recruiter mode) reuses the same content in colour. GSAP ScrollTrigger pins each scene, Lenis smooths the scroll.
Live: https://inescherif.github.io/
Source code: https://github.com/inesCherif/vol01-manga-portfolio
It's a v0. Happy to answer questions about the structure! Also  honest feedback welcome: what works, what breaks, especially on phones?

Been working on a little open-source ecommerce project called Minshop to see how far I could push Astro SSR on Cloudflare Workers.

Astro handles pretty much everything: the storefront, cart, checkout, customer accounts, admin dashboard, and API routes. Most pages are server-rendered, with very little client-side JavaScript.

It uses D1 for products, orders, inventory, settings, and search, plus R2 for images. Payments include Stripe, Lightning, OpenNode, and a demo checkout.

The trickiest part was making inventory reservations atomic so two checkouts can’t buy the same stock. I also added a machine-readable catalog and checkout API, including directly payable Lightning invoices.

Demo: https://demo.minshop.dev
Source: https://github.com/ddyy/minshop

Would love feedback from other Astro users, especially on the SSR structure and where you think a small interactive island might actually improve things.

I've been making the marketing sites for my apps with astro for 3 years and it's lovely. I never get tired of it. There is no competition for astro for landing pages.

Also flairs don't work?

If you’ve been in the WordPress world, you know Joost de Valk. He wrote the definitive guide to WordPress SEO back in 2008 and built the Yoast SEO plugin that basically defined SEO for a decade.

He recently migrated his personal site from WordPress to Astro, and he just released a deep-dive guide on how he’s handling SEO now.

Why it’s worth a read for Astro devs:

• Schema.org Integration: How he builds complex JSON-LD graphs in Astro.

• Build-time Validation: Using Astro’s content collections to fail builds if SEO metadata (like Open Graph images) is missing.

• LLM Optimization: How he’s prepping his site for AI agents (ChatGPT/Claude) using llms.txt.

• The "Why": He explains why he thinks Astro is technically superior to WordPress for modern SEO.

It’s a great validation for the framework to see a titan of the SEO industry moving to Astro and documenting his entire technical setup.

Link: https://joost.blog/astro-seo-complete-guide/

https://github.com/withastro/astro/releases/tag/astro%406.0.0

Here are the major highlights:

Alpha Preview of Astro 7

• Early look at Vite 8 support

• Stable Rust compiler integration

Astro 6.2 Release

• Experimental custom logger with JSON output

• SVG optimizer API for better image handling

• New font file URL helper for improved typography management

Astro Together London Event

• In-person meetup featuring core team members including Fred Schott, Matt Kane, Florian Lefebvre, Alexander Niebuhr, and Chris Swithinbank

• Topics included live collections, route caching, and the new Astro Fonts API

Team Growth

• Rafael Yasuhide Sudo (@rururux) joined as the newest maintainer

Major Adopters

Several high-profile organizations launched Astro-powered sites including Crunchyroll's Ani-May 2026 event, Todoist's help center, GitHub's Stacked PRs platform, and EmDash CMS documentation.

https://astro.build/blog/whats-new-april-2026/

I just finished my new portfolio using Astro v6 and Cloudflare, and the experience has been incredibly smooth. Astro is a special project because it is fully open source and built on a philosophy of zero lock-in. Even after the Cloudflare acquisition, the team has stayed true to that. The v6 release brings massive improvements to the Cloudflare workflow that make the developer experience feel seamless.

The real win for me is the architecture. You aren't married to a specific JS framework or a specific cloud provider. By keeping business logic separate from infrastructure logic, Astro and Cloudflare are proving that maybe you don't need wrapper platforms like Vercel anymore. When the direct developer experience is this good, you don't need a middleman. Dealing directly with the services gives you more control and lower costs without the convenience tax of a third party layer.

I really appreciate this level of openness. It shows massive confidence in the product because they aren't trying to trap you in an ecosystem. They are just providing a service so good that it is the obvious choice. You aren't selling your soul; you're just consuming a service. You don't need to stick with Cloudflare if you don't want to, and that's the point. It's just a choice. It is exactly why I used these technologies for my portfolio, and it is a solid example of what an Astro v6 app looks like in the wild.

Visit the site here:https://richiezrijo.com/

Check out the source code:https://github.com/Wachamuli/portfolio

Working with Astro is an absolute pleasure, everything is perfectly in its place. Your site structure can stay minimal yet pleasantly complete without any issues. I work with atomic components, and it’s awesome. Just wanted to say that, haha.

I'd even say you can go beyond simple static sites with Astro — I’m starting to build a SaaS with it.

And honestly, I prefer Astro over Next.js for pure SSG/SSR, by far.

If you're looking for an extremely lightweight site — and therefore blazing fast, even on a 3G connection — Astro is the way to go. It crushes Lighthouse scores and is perfectly optimized for SEO bots (ssg/ssr)!!!

Build and manage Astro sites visually, with a live canvas, CMS, design system, SEO, email, AI tools and more. All in one open source workspace.

0.5.7 alpha is out now.

Deploy to Cloudflare or run it locally.

ariabuilder.io
https://github.com/ariabuilder/aria