Post by Oliver Lietz
Fast websites? Try Astro 馃殌
In February 2026, a friend asked me to help with his small website.
The website was using an (un)managed WordPress instance at IONOS, and he was charged for PHP Extended Support.
PageSpeed Insights for WordPress (mobile):
WordPress, TYPO3 and other content management systems can become slow, insecure and expensive quite quickly. And very often, full-blown content management systems with user management and workflows are not needed.
I set up a project on GitHub, and we started working on a rewrite from scratch using Astro with clean, modern HTML and CSS.
The Astro website is using content collections for pages and content blocks and in addition few lines of custom TypeScript code for the navigation.
The content is stored in Markdown files and can be directly authored on GitHub.
On every change (commit) a build (Static Site Generation) is started, and on success the website gets published with IONOS Deploy Now.
PageSpeed Insights for Astro (mobile):
| WordPress Mobile | WordPress Desktop | Astro Mobile | Astro Desktop | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Performance | 40 | 72 | 100 | 100 |
| Accessibility | 88 | 91 | 95 | 92 |
| Best Practices | 96 | 100 | 96 | 100 |
| SEO | 92 | 92 | 100 | 100 |
Static Site Generation allows fast and secure content websites of any scale with inexpensive hosting.
Astro got my attention in 2021 (before the 1.0 release) due to its support for Island Architecture, and I鈥檓 a happy user since then. Astro 7.0 was released some days ago with many improvements and new features.
I鈥檓 a former Magnolia CMS Committer, Apache Sling PMC member and Architect for Adobe Experience Manager. I do IT for fun and profit.
