Why I'm rewriting my blog in Astro

A short tour through the tradeoffs: static-first, islands architecture, and keeping the client JavaScript budget close to zero.

Last year I ran my blog on Gatsby. It worked, but the JavaScript budget kept creeping up and Lighthouse scores drifted down. I wanted static HTML, minimum JS, and a pipeline that treats math, code, and diagrams as first-class citizens.

The stack

Astro as the SSG, Tailwind v4 for utilities, remark-math + rehype-katex for LaTeX, and Pagefind for client-side search. Everything pre-rendered at build time.

export default defineConfig({
  output: 'static',
  integrations: [mdx(), preact(), sitemap()],
});

The only JavaScript shipped to the browser lives inside four explicit islands (command palette, theme toggle, comments, analytics). Pages that don’t use those islands ship 0 KB of runtime JS.

Lighthouse scores bounce back to 100/100.