After 15 years of building websites for businesses, I’ve worked with WordPress, custom PHP, React, Next.js, and everything in between. For the last two years, my default for small and medium business sites has been Astro. Here’s why.
The problem with most business websites
A typical small business website needs five to ten pages: home, about, services, contact, maybe a blog. That’s it. Yet most of these sites get built with tools designed for web applications: React, Vue, or a plugin-heavy WordPress setup.
The result? Sites that:
- Load slowly because they ship megabytes of JavaScript to display static text
- Score 60-70 on Lighthouse even after “optimization”
- Break after a plugin update
- Cost a developer day just to change the phone number
For a business owner, that’s a real problem. Slow sites lose visitors. Google ranks fast sites higher. And paying a developer to fix WordPress every three months is money that should go somewhere else.
What Astro does differently
Astro is a web framework with one core principle: ship zero JavaScript by default.
When you build a page with Astro, the output is plain HTML and CSS. No runtime framework, no hydration overhead, no React tree to reconcile. The browser receives exactly what it needs to display the page, nothing more.
For a business site, that means:
- Pages load in under a second on mobile
- Lighthouse scores of 100 across the board: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO
- No JavaScript errors breaking the layout
- No framework to update or maintain
You still get components
The common objection: “But I need interactivity. I need a contact form, a mobile menu, maybe a map.”
Astro handles that well. You write components in .astro files, a clean syntax that looks like HTML with some logic on top. For the rare parts that genuinely need JavaScript (a form submission, a dropdown), you opt in explicitly. Everything else stays static.
---
// This runs at build time. Zero JS shipped to the browser.
const services = ['Marketing', 'Web Development', 'SEO', 'IT Solutions'];
---
<ul>
{services.map(service => <li>{service}</li>)}
</ul>You can even mix in React or Vue components for specific interactive sections, and Astro renders them server-side, hydrating them on the client only when needed. This is called Islands Architecture, and it’s one of the smartest ideas in modern web development.
Deployment is trivial
Astro builds to static files. A folder of HTML, CSS, and a few images. So you can host it anywhere:
- Cloudflare Pages: free, global CDN, automatic deploys from GitHub
- Netlify or Vercel: same story
- Any static host: even an S3 bucket
My setup for most client sites: GitHub repository plus Cloudflare Pages. Push a commit, and the site is live worldwide in 30 seconds. No server to manage, no database to back up, no PHP version to worry about.
The hosting cost for a typical Astro site: zero.
SEO comes built in
Astro renders HTML on the server (or at build time), which means search engines see real content immediately, not a blank page waiting for JavaScript to hydrate.
Combined with proper meta tags, sitemap generation, and structured data (all supported natively in Astro), a new site can start ranking within weeks rather than months.
For a small business competing locally in Switzerland, that matters. A site that loads fast, serves clean HTML, and scores well on Core Web Vitals has a genuine ranking advantage over a bloated WordPress competitor.
When Astro is the right choice
Astro fits when:
- The site is mostly content: pages, blog posts, portfolio items, services
- Performance and SEO are priorities
- The team maintaining the site is small (or it’s just you)
- You want hosting that costs nothing and needs no maintenance
It’s probably not the right fit when you’re building a complex web app: a dashboard with real-time data, a multi-user platform, something with heavy client-side state. For that, you want Next.js or a full SPA framework.
But for most business websites? Astro is the right tool.
What this means for clients
When I build a site with Astro, I’m handing the client something that:
- Loads fast: typically under 1 second on a mid-range mobile connection
- Ranks well: clean HTML, fast load times, proper structured data
- Costs nothing to host: the Cloudflare Pages free tier covers most sites
- Stays reliable: no plugins, no database, no moving parts to break
- Is easy to update: content lives in Markdown files, editable from GitHub without touching code
After 15 years of building websites, the best thing I can hand a client is a site they don’t have to think about. Astro gets me closer to that than anything else I’ve used.
If you’re considering a new website for your business and want to understand the right technical choice for your situation, get in touch. I’m happy to talk it through.