We’ve all been there. You learn a new tool, and suddenly, you want to use it for everything. It’s a natural sense of security. It happened to me years ago with WordPress and PHP—they were my gateway into this world and the reason I landed my first clients. I don’t look back on them with regret; quite the opposite.
But nowadays, it’s easy to get swept up in the hype. It makes sense: when a technology becomes dominant and the job market demands it, we want to master it and apply it to every project. The problem starts when the “tool of the moment” becomes the only hammer we use for every single nail.
As you spend more time writing code, you realize that less is often more. Or, as the saying goes: “keep it simple.”
The “Everything is an App” Trap
It’s a classic scenario: you start a project with Next.js because it’s the industry standard. You feel productive. But six months later, you realize that—without aggressive, conscious optimization—you’re shipping 300kb of JavaScript just to render a simple landing page.
Then the client comes in demanding a 100/100 Lighthouse score. While Lighthouse isn’t everything, it’s the metric clients use to evaluate our work. And they’re right to do so: they pay for results, not for our developer experience (DX).
Our “over-hydration” costs were killing performance. How do you explain to a client that their site is sluggish because you’re using “incredible” technology? Clients don’t care if you use Next.js or a No-Code builder. They want results.
And then came Astro
Right at that peak of frustration, while searching for a way out of over-engineering, the landscape shifted. In mid-2022, Astro entered the game with a radical proposal: HTML by default.
I’ll never forget a quote by Manzdev: “I think many companies still don’t realize today that the technology they actually need is Astro.” I couldn’t agree more. It’s not that Astro is the answer to everything; it’s that we often don’t even stop to ask if the tool we’re using actually fits the problem at hand.
Astro makes the cost of using frameworks like Next.js painfully visible when they aren’t necessary. But it also exposes the other side of the coin: poorly planned, bloated WordPress sites. It makes me wonder why so many agencies still deliver sites built with heavy visual builders under the guise of “speed,” only to slap on “performance-boosting” plugins later when the client complains about a 50/100 mobile score. I know the feeling—I’ve lived it.
So, why stick to inertia? Astro lets us build with the same component-based comfort we love, but without the performance tax. If the interactivity is minimal, you don’t even need a framework—a bit of Vanilla JS and you’re flying.
Astro isn’t just static HTML and opt-in JavaScript
A common misconception is that Astro is only for blogs or simple sites. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Its real power lies in the fact that it doesn’t force you to abandon your favorite framework—it lets you use it only when strictly necessary.
Thanks to Islands Architecture, if a client asks for a complex dashboard or a price calculator tomorrow, I can drop in a React or Vue component without a second thought. The difference? Instead of hydrating React across parts of the page that don’t need it (a common pattern in many Next.js setups), Astro limits the JavaScript to those small, specific “interactive islands.”
And with the new Server Islands and Server Actions, Astro is moving fast into dynamic territory. We can render personalized content from the server on demand without sacrificing the cache. It’s a model that covers a massive range of dynamic use cases without compromising global performance.
Conclusion
This isn’t to say Next.js or WordPress are bad tools. Next.js is a powerhouse for massive, complex web applications, and WordPress provides solid solutions globally. They are industry leaders for a reason. However, for most websites—portfolios, corporate sites, or SaaS landings—using them can feel like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Choosing Astro allows me to deliver that 100/100 Lighthouse score the client expects, keep my codebase clean, and, most importantly, strip my JavaScript down to the absolute essentials. Plus, I don’t have to sacrifice my comfort; working with Astro is a blast—it’s incredibly fast and intuitive.
Ultimately, there has to be a balance. We must always remember that our clients don’t care about the stack we use—they care about the results we deliver. In fact, they probably don’t even know what Astro is, so don’t choose it unless it’s truly what the project needs.
