What is Astro and why does it feel so fast?

Astro is a web framework built for content-first websites: marketing sites, blogs, documentation and shops that mostly present content. The core idea is simple. A page is assembled into HTML on the server, and only the JavaScript that is genuinely needed is sent to the browser.

That last part is the islands architecture. An interactive piece, such as a search bar or a carousel, becomes an island with its own JavaScript. The rest of the page stays static HTML. The result is a site that loads fast and leaves little work for the browser.

Astro works with your favourite tools. You write components in .astro, and can add React, Svelte or Vue alongside them for the interactive islands. Content is managed with Content Collections, where the structure of your articles is checked at build time.

This site, AstroBuild, is itself built with Astro and runs on Cloudflare. It serves as a demo of what this approach makes possible. In the next articles we go deeper into the features, and the release calendar lets you follow what changes in Astro in real time.