Over the last couple of months a shift has been happening in startup marketing sites.
Founders who once reached straight for Webflow or Framer are moving to Astro instead.
Some want a faster site. Some want to stop paying for seats and hosting plans they barely use. And a growing number simply want a website they can update by asking an AI assistant, rather than by learning a visual editor or asking a dev.
What is Astro?
Astro is an open source web framework for building content-driven websites: marketing sites, blogs, documentation, landing pages and portfolios. You write your pages as components in code, Astro builds them into plain HTML and CSS, and that output can be hosted almost anywhere, from Netlify and Vercel to Cloudflare.
Its idea is simple. Most of a marketing site is content that never needs to change once it reaches the browser, so most of it should not ship any JavaScript at all. Astro sends HTML by default and only adds JavaScript where a page genuinely needs it. This results in a pretty performant framework, when compared to others and what tools like Webflow and Framer ships by default.
A framework, not a website builder
It helps to be clear about what kind of tool Astro is, because it is often compared with tools that work very differently.
Webflow and Framer are visual site builders. You design and build on a canvas, the platform stores your site in its own format, and it hosts the result for you.
That is a real strength when a designer wants to own the site end to end without writing code. The trade off is that your site lives inside the platform, you often pay per site and often per seat, and you are limited to the interactions and integrations the platform supports.
Astro is a framework. Your site is a folder of code that you own outright, kept in version control and deployed wherever you want. There is no canvas (but we are building one), but there's also no ceiling: anything the web can do, your site can do.
Why Astro is so fast
Speed is the reason most teams first look at Astro.
A typical Astro page arrives in the browser as ready-made HTML with little or no JavaScript to download, parse and run before the page becomes usable. That shows up directly in Core Web Vitals, in mobile performance and, increasingly, in how easily search engines and AI crawlers can read your content.
Islands of interactivity
Of course, real sites still need interactive pieces: a pricing toggle, a booking widget, a carousel. Astro handles these with what it calls islands architecture.
The page is static HTML, and each interactive component is an island that loads its own JavaScript independently.
You also decide when each island wakes up. A component can load straight away, when the browser is idle, or only once it scrolls into view. The result is a page that feels instant, with interactivity exactly where it earns its place.
Islands can be written in React, Vue, Svelte, Solid or plain JavaScript, and you can mix them on the same site. That makes Astro a lightweight foundation that does not lock you into a single way of building.
Built to grow with you
Lightweight does not mean limited. Astro scales from a five page launch site to thousands of pages without changing approach.
Content collections
Astro has content collections built in. You define the shape of your content (blog posts, case studies, team members etc.) and Astro checks every entry against that shape at build time.
Collections can be as simple as Markdown files in your repository, which is often all an early stage startup needs.
Pairing with a headless CMS
When more people need to edit the site, Astro pairs naturally with a headless CMS such as Sanity, which has become a popular choice for growing teams.
Your marketing team edits content in a friendly interface, and Astro pulls it in and renders it as fast, static pages. Content and code stay separate, so a copy change never needs a developer and a redesign never needs a content migration.
Because Astro can also render pages on the server when you need it, you can add things like personalised pages, form handling or gated content later without switching frameworks.
Why AI tooling has accelerated the move to Astro
A big part of Astro's recent growth comes from how sites are now being built. More and more founders, marketers and designers are building and editing their websites with AI tools such as Claude Code, Codex and similar coding assistants.
These tools work best with code. A visual builder stores your site in a proprietary format that an AI assistant cannot easily read or change. An Astro site is just files, written in widely used languages, with a clear and predictable structure. That makes it easy for an AI assistant to understand and safe for it to edit.
In practice, that means a founder can ask for a new landing page, a pricing table or a redesigned hero section, review the change and ship it, without waiting days or weeks, or having learning a new tool.
Astro is not the only framework benefiting from this. Next.js has seen the same wave of AI-driven adoption. But for marketing sites in particular, Astro has become one of the most common picks.
Astro vs Next.js
Next.js is the framework Astro is most often compared with, and the two do overlap. Both are modern, well supported, work well with AI tooling, pair with headless CMSs like Sanity and can produce fast sites. For many marketing sites, either would be a reasonable choice.
The difference is what each is designed for. Next.js is a React framework built first and foremost for web applications: products with logins, dashboards, live data and lots of interactive state. It is excellent at that, but it ships the React runtime to the browser and hydrates pages so they can become interactive, even when a page is mostly static content. A well built Next.js marketing site can still be quick, but it takes more deliberate tuning to stay quick.
Astro starts from the opposite end. It assumes your pages are content first and asks you to opt in to JavaScript, rather than opt out. For a marketing site, that usually means less code sent to the browser and strong performance by default, with less effort to keep it that way.
Many startups end up with both: an Astro marketing site at the root domain and a Next.js product behind a login.
Is Astro right for you?
Astro is a strong fit if most of these sound familiar:
- Your website is mainly marketing pages, a blog or case studies, rather than the product itself.
- Page speed, SEO and visibility in AI search matter to your growth.
- You are paying for seats, plans or add-ons on a website builder that you rarely use.
- You want to own your site and be free to host it anywhere.
- You, or your team, would rather update the site with AI tooling than learn a visual editor.
It may not be the right move if a non-technical designer wants to build and restyle pages visually every week, with no interest in working through code or an AI assistant. In that case a visual builder like Webflow or Framer still earns its keep.
How we can help you move to Astro
Moving platform can feel risky. Your site has years of pages, CMS content, SEO rankings and inbound links that you cannot afford to lose. That is why we have launched a dedicated Webflow to Astro migration service.
We move every page, CMS item and redirect across, rebuild your design faithfully in Astro, and connect your content to a CMS such as Sanity so your team can keep editing it. You end up with a fast, portable codebase that you own, set up so you can keep updating it yourself with AI tooling.
Not on Webflow? We migrate sites from Framer, WordPress, Squarespace and other platforms too.
If you are weighing up the move, take the quick check and compare the long-term costs on our migration page, or get in touch and we will tell you honestly whether Astro is right for your site.