Why we picked Astro for agency sites
After three years of framework tourism, we standardized on Astro for most of our client work. Here's why — and when we still reach for something else.
We spent a good chunk of 2023 and 2024 bouncing between Next.js, Remix, SvelteKit, and a handful of static site generators. In early 2025 we quietly standardized on Astro for most of our marketing and content-heavy client work, and we haven’t looked back.
The short version
For 80% of the sites we build — marketing pages, blogs, portfolios, small e-commerce storefronts — we want:
- Fast page loads with no JS by default. Islands where they help, plain HTML where they don’t.
- An authoring experience editors enjoy. MDX + content collections hits that note perfectly.
- A build output we can host anywhere. Static HTML plus the occasional edge function.
Astro ships all of this out of the box. Nothing else we tried made it as easy to start with the right defaults.
When we still reach for something else
- Highly interactive apps with real-time data → we reach for Next.js or Remix.
- Small, personal sites where we want zero config → we still love Eleventy.
- Anything with a heavy SSR session model → depends on the hosting target.
What surprised us
The thing we didn’t expect was how much happier our clients would be. The CMS integrations are clean, previews work out of the box, and “the site loads fast on my grandmother’s iPad” has become a sentence we get to hear often.
- #astro
- #performance
- #tooling