rebuilt in astro
Hello, come on in - don’t worry about taking your shoes off. I’ve popped the kettle on and I think there’s some biscuits knocking around if you fancy two or three, or twelve.
If you’ve been here before, things should look roughly the same. But peel back the delightfully quirky minimalism-fights-neo-brutalism aesthetic, though, and you’ll find its innards look very different… astro-nomically different you could say.
That’s right Mr. Holmes, your powers of deduction are sharp as ever - I’m saying the site has migrated from WordPress to Astro.
why astro?
WordPress is genuinely fine for most sites and was a gentle, familiar place to start. But I kept finding myself bumping into its limitations and discovering the functionality I wanted meant either adding yet another plugin, or a fiddly dive into the code to tack on something that ultimately never really worked like I’d envisioned it.
A few months back I mentioned I was tinkering with Astro. I decided I needed to direct my efforts towards a project and that eventually manifested itself as the SEO Handbook. After spending a big chunk of time working in Astro, returning to WordPress felt like trying to build stuff in a cave with a box of scraps. I’m not quite Tony Stark.
what’s changed
Performance. No PHP, no database queries, no big pile of plugins. Just static files served from Cloudflare’s edge. The site is noticeably faster - not “I ran it through PageSpeed Insights and the number went up” faster, just actually, immediately faster.
SEO, built in. Yoast and Rank Math are great when used properly, but nothing beats full, direct control over a site’s SEO. Canonical tags, Open Graph, JSON-LD schema, a proper sitemap with priority tiers - all built to spec, exactly as I want them.
The theme. Still the same look, but it’s all CSS written from scratch now instead of a bunch of additional classes stapled on to a prebuilt component, so it behaves exactly as intended rather than fighting a theme for the privilege of looking the way I want it to look.
No bloat. The old site was running half a dozen plugins to do things Astro handles natively - caching, image optimisation, security headers, sitemaps. All gone. It’s just files, glorious files.
what hasn’t changed
The content, the bookmarklets, the general good vibes. If anything was bookmarked or linked to, it should still work - redirects are in place for anything that got shifted around in the move.
Is this likely overkill for a personal site? - Absolutely. But as Doc Brown put it: “if you’re gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?” Besides, it’s not over-engineered, it’s future-proof.
That’s pretty much it. Tea’s going cold - grab another biscuit on the way out. I’ll keep poking AI with a stick to see if it wants to fight or just keep ignoring my pleas for no emdashes.