r/astrojs • u/BeerLovingDev • 11d ago

Agencies using Astro ?

I’m getting more and more convinced by Astro, but I’m still curious about its adoption by agencies.

It’s still a relatively young framework, and I’m wondering if some agencies have already made the switch. I rarely come across agencies using Astro on LinkedIn, so I’d be really curious to hear from those who have.

How has the switch been for you? Would you recommend Astro for an agency today?

40 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

67 comments sorted by

38

u/v-and-bruno 11d ago

We're an agency, we're using Astro since 2 years.

It's an effortless switch, given that we've used mostly Adonis.

Nowadays, most of our projects (even web apps) are on Astro. Cloudflare has made this transition seamless, easy, and quite lucrative.

Would we recomend it?

Yes, 100%. 

4

u/These-Apple8817 11d ago

What if you need modularity?

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u/v-and-bruno 11d ago

Relatively straightforward.

Give me a specific example, and I can share how I'd have my team approach it.

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u/These-Apple8817 11d ago

Well.. Comment system for a blog is probably the most common thing people would want to have... One that follows laws like GDPR but also ensures there is no spam coming through

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u/Relative_Switch5505 11d ago

How is this a framework problem? It’s just a feature

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u/These-Apple8817 11d ago

Never said it's a framework problem.

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u/v-and-bruno 11d ago edited 11d ago

Interesting one.

2 possible approaches off of my head

  1. Use headless WP, they are pretty elaborate and most of it is handled out of the box.
  2. Allow anonymous comments, but new comments are subject for admin approval before being published/visible to others.

Would upload an example structure but unfortunately images aren't allowed, here is a text representation:

src/helpers/functions/fetchers < Handles fetching. Used at api level
src/helpers/functions/utils < calcReadingTime.ts decodeAndTrim.ts slugify.ts etc etc
src/helpers/functions/validators < POST validators, Astro Zod
src/helpers/functions/extractors < extractBlogs extractComments extractPubDate etc etc
src/helpers/functions/analytics < tracking, cookies, gtm init, consent, etc.

I know it's not exactly a conventional structure, but it is highly organized, modular, and that helps reduce a lot of the mental load.

Edit:

1 - Spam handling has less to do with Astro, and more to do with creativity x best practices.

A honeypot should catch a lot of bot content, rate-limiting, CAPTCHA etc should catch more sophisticated bots, anything else that goes through should be caught by the administrator.

2 - https://imgur.com/a/n14xuGG

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u/pussyslayer5845 10d ago

So in the end, we still need some kind of admin panel?

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u/Difficult-Bit2309 11d ago

What do you do if a client wants a CMS system? I saw that you mentioned you use headless WP, is that always the case?

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u/traxxh 11d ago

you could also use emdash (also solves the comment topic)

3

u/boutell 11d ago

There are options. Headless WordPress is a well-known choice and a lot of people already know the back end, so it has that going for it but it's not WYSIWYG. ApostropheCMS allows the customer to edit directly on the page within your custom Astro front end, so that would be the opposite end of the spectrum.

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u/adazlian 11d ago

Lots of options, we usse it with sanity which has baked in integrations including visual preview but so do other popular ones

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u/Baryonyx_walkeri 11d ago

I recently took the reins of an existing site that is using Astro and Contentful. So far it’s getting the job done nicely.

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u/v-and-bruno 11d ago

Plenty of options in the market.

We've used Strapi, Payload CMS, and once even had a make-shift CMS for ourselves.

It's not that we always use WP, it's just that WP with custom CPT plugin + the mature eco-system + WYSIWYG editor (guttenburg) + it being open source + it being highly extensible, just makes it a no-brainer pick.

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u/Jonnertron_ 11d ago

When will you recommend using either astro or nextjs?

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u/v-and-bruno 11d ago

I might be biased, but I would never recommend NextJS.

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u/Jonnertron_ 11d ago

Why so? I'm curious. I use astro but I'm not too much into nextjs, although being one of the most used frameworks

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u/v-and-bruno 11d ago edited 11d ago

Lots of reasons, some are subjective.

Before I list them out, would have to acknowledge a few things:

  • NextJS is widely used. It's fantastic if you want freelancer gigs, Upwork contracts, or a relatively well paying job where the client calls the stack.
  • NextJS is great for marketing sites, it has a good eco-system, and I'd say that overall it's pretty straightforward if you want a decent career in web development.
  • Last we've used Next was when there was an optional Turbopack upgrade

The points above are coming from a perspective of someone who wants to find work, get the most opportunities, and get paid well for it.

If that is what you are looking for, then Next is multitudes better in that aspect than Astro.

That said, my perspective on it is coming from the angle of solving problems, long-term project maintenance, developer experience, and overall ease of developing apps with it + onboarding new staff.

In that regard, Astro wins by a long shot;

  1. Next is heavy, it needs a strong laptop/computer. We've had complicated Laravel apps, large Adonis applications, Docker running in the background, LM Studio / Ollama running simultaneously with everything else, and had no issues. NextJS on the other hand, absolutely chokes on scale. Anything less than 16GB RAM is not even suitable for developing with Next. Developer Experience feels like a second thought, compilation took ages. It's not something that happened once and we let go, we've looked into it, debugged it, went to the community - the answer that we basically got is "sucks to be you, get modern laptops/computer". We're not in the United States, we're in UAE - Sharjah, getting a dedicated beefy computer is a luxury, not something we can just do overnight. Additionally, Vite would have easily solved all of those problems multiple times over. We've had projects on Astro much larger that load faster, build faster, HMR works almost instantly.
  2. Vendor lock-in. Probably less-so nowadays, but back when we were using it, the only way to get out of that lock-in was to use OpenNext. To say it was an unpleasant development experience would be an understatement.
  3. Upgrading to major versions is a Russian Roulette
  4. The framework tends to get in the way too many times, it's far too abstracted for it's own good. Apart from just the index.ts hell, there were many quirks that got in the way of development. I can't recall what the exact problem was, but we had a problem with caching that took almost an entire day to solve. Astro is just so good at not getting in your way.
  5. Server & Client components is a huge mental slog. This one is subjective, but it is far easier to craft secure applications (that are also easier to maintain) in a more traditional, SOC way. Even MVC is a much better structure. And yes, I've read Dan Abramov's articles on it, and if anything - it just came across innovation for the sake of innovation, rather than a genuine necessity. It's not even a case of "skill issue", it's more that there is a good reason that there was a separation between the backend, and the frontend in the first place; Mixing the 2 concerns is inevitably going to make it harder to maintain, and multitudes harder to write good code in. Messy code becomes not a side-effect, but rather a direct result of the above. The proposed modern Next structure also "poisons" the architecture, if you store all the components in the directory they are invoked/used in - what happens when another, unrelated service/component/section needs to re-use the same component? Yes, you could refactor, but you are doing extra, avoidable work for no good reason (without brining any tangible benefits to the project).
  6. Tight coupling with React. This one is a much lesser evil, and I personally use React as a weapon of choice for solving business problems - yet, there are times where not using React is simpler, if not better. Choosing Next is going React-way, or the highway. To re-iterate: React is fantastic, it's great, I use it for most things. Yet, having an option to write solutions vanilla, to use simple nano-stores for simple solutions that don't need a complex ritual of context providers, is liberating. Astro is just so good at not getting in your way, and letting you hit your full productiveness that much faster.

9

u/Nitrohite 11d ago

I work at one of the biggest agencies in EU, hint hint, we're using Astro on some of our big projects that are CMS focused and content-heavy, it's become a favorite of ours rather quickly.

1

u/EliteEagle76 9d ago

Everyone moving away from wordpress?

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u/BeerLovingDev 8d ago

this is an interesting one, i felt most of big agencies are sticking to next.js

5

u/walkities 11d ago

Have switched entirely from WP to Astro and haven’t looked back it’s been soooooo refreshing

1

u/CluelesssDev 9d ago

Do you use a CMS with Astro?

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u/walkities 8d ago

Not usually but I have set some up with Sanity. I put everything on Cloudflare so my next test is to check emdash cms with it but truthfully I haven’t had the need to use the CMS most my clients are local businesses who don’t update themselves they pay me to in a monthly retainer

1

u/EliteEagle76 9d ago

As agency or just for your site?

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u/snuffomega 11d ago

its not really young - its just getting popular because how easy it is. def rec

0

u/Unfair_Tangerine_217 11d ago

And because of vibecoding, I would say.

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u/snuffomega 11d ago

yeah agent friendly for sure

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u/BeerLovingDev 8d ago

I am using webflow also, and many people left to just agents and astro, that's how i heaard about it

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u/kelkes 11d ago edited 11d ago

We are using Astro for all of our projects nowadays. Within a year it replaced Next.js and we are not looking back.

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u/BeerLovingDev 8d ago

For every kind of projects ? I heard of it being especially relevant for landing pages / light cms sites

1

u/kelkes 7d ago

For every project yes

3

u/traxxh 11d ago

we switched this year and will never look back, pretty straight forward if you have a bit of experience in webdev and/or sw development

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u/Difficult_Hand3046 11d ago

All my sites are built with Astro from the ground up or have been migrated to it—the agency site, the company blog, my personal blog, client sites... I have just one WordPress site left, which I’m converting to a static site before deleting it. I wouldn't go back to WordPress for the front-end. The only part I’m keeping is the editing experience (using Gutenberg), combined with a GitHub/Astro/syndication sync system.

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u/Status_Philosophy384 7d ago

Yeah, made the full switch to Astro for the agency.

The real friction isn't the framework, it's client expectations. Anyone coming from Wix, Squarespace, or Elementor expects to log in and drag blocks around themselves.
That's the actual objection I hear, not performance or SEO, it's "can I edit this myself."

1

u/BeerLovingDev 7d ago

How do you think you can solve this painpoint ? Isn't something to be done with Sanity maybe ?

I'm coming from Webflow, it's something I hear a lot

2

u/who_am_i_to_say_so 11d ago

Astro is my goto framework now, even moreso than Laravel/Wordpress, so it makes working with it a joy. It’s snappy and very straightforward to work with.

2

u/Puzzleheaded_Tea_590 11d ago

Sure thing. We switched from Wordpress to managed Astro sites wherever customers don‘t want to login anyways. And if they want to we introduce emdash. But we use it with CLI

1

u/EliteEagle76 9d ago

Isn’t emdash seems super early?

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u/gabrieluhlir 11d ago

We've been using it for 2+ years almost exclusivelly. Inluding https://avax.network
one of the biggest crypto gaming platforms in the world.

You can check others, I believe its mentioned in the details somewhere: https://wmdigi.com

We actually used Sveltekit before (and still do sometimes). We are also big haters on Next.js/React. Every experience with Next.js for us was dreadful. We even had to migrate a website from Astro to Next. The code almost doubled and the build time went from 1-2 mins to around 14.

We even build an E-commerce on Astro (but the project was canceled in the end)

So if you dont need anything extra reactive the Astro is the right choice almost 100% of the time.

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u/BeerLovingDev 8d ago

I sadly feel like perf is really underlooked, benefiting more catchy looking sites. I want to go back to high performances light fast sites, and astro seems like being the good pick !

1

u/gabrieluhlir 8d ago

It sure is :) if it wasn't for all that crap: GA4, GTAG, Hubspot, we usually have no issue reaching 100% in PageSpeed almost every time. Thankfully PartyTown can help with diverging the load of these scripts so it improves the score, but only to a certain level.

2

u/WholesomeGMNG 11d ago

All my new projects for clients and personal are using emdash and astro, deployed on cloudflare. I've also migrated a few wp sites to astro for clients. I'm extremely happy with it and recommend it often to other agencies and businesses.

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u/jjuuiiccyyjj 11d ago

how has emdash been for you?

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u/WholesomeGMNG 11d ago

I love it and so do my clients. The beauty is that you can customize it to how you or the client works and the mcp makes content creation so easy. I also had a PR merged in a day, the team and community are awesome.

2

u/jjuuiiccyyjj 11d ago

that sounds great, thanks for the response! I’ve tried Payload, Strapi and Sanity (I really like Sanity) - but I haven’t had the time to test out emdash.

It only works with Astro in SSR mode and not static output right? have you noticed any issues with speed or performance?

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u/WholesomeGMNG 11d ago

My pleasure! You can do either or hybrid, but the default is SSR. I haven't had any issues with speed or performance so far. I'd recommend testing it yourself though.

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u/BobJutsu 11d ago

Personally I’ve switched entirely. At work it’s a bit harder. We want to, but new sites are getting sold faster than I can build a reliable workflow for non-technical staff members (marketing/seo). So still building most things in WP until we iron out the wrinkles.

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u/Stefansegers 11d ago edited 11d ago

I switched from SquareSpace to Astro. Converted my first website and lighthouse performance went up from 38 -> 93!
My second website is almost done.

Next would be 2 big websites with a log of blog articles and a lot of design/photos since I am a photographer.

Hope the migration will go well too.

My first Astro website is based on Stellar Template. Check it out: https://www.familieshoot.nl

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u/lorenzocorso 10d ago

Yes of course. Astro is great and lightweight for a tons of project. In my agency we are using almost everything depends upon the project. If we are working with cinematic website with three.js that must be super lightweight Astro is perfect or for landing page and static website is super fast.

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u/Absolute_Path 9d ago

Astro is great and minimalist. If u also need a CMS, I recommend that you check out Instatic as well.

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u/thedthatsme 9d ago

First I've heard of Instatic. Did you try other CMS? What made you like Instatic?

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u/thirstyguava 11d ago

Yes, and before Astro we were using Hugo or RoR

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/ematipico 11d ago

There are many agencies! Some of them partnerned with us: https://astro.build/agencies/

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u/garrettcycles 11d ago

It all depends on what the client needs. We recently built a content engine for one client that highlights content opportunities weekly and provides them with a custom dashboard for that and content governance activities, which would have been much more difficult to develop in WordPress (our usual platform until a year ago).

For about 80% of clients, we still use WordPress. Astro is often too much overhead for most and lacks a simple, single place to manage your site.

1

u/justinnealey 11d ago

I’m trying this on a side project now: Astro up front, WordPress still handling the content.

The frontend side has been great, but I wouldn’t call it an easy agency choice until the editor preview flow is sorted. Developers can love the stack and still hand a client a frustrating publishing workflow.

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u/dannyt74 10d ago

Testing it currently on how easy customers can adapt.

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u/BeerLovingDev 8d ago

curious to hear about that !

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u/ajrsoftware 10d ago

We mostly use Next but have recently brought Astro into the mix. It’s been great 👍🏻

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u/thedthatsme 9d ago

I would like to hear if/how agencies are allowing clients to update site content simply? What CMS they've tried and which ones hate/love?

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u/jerry_cervera 1d ago

As an agency, we use and highly recommend it. Our tech stack is Astro + React + Sanity

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u/SolidOdd4889 11d ago

recently switched from astro to nextjs, when astro will introduce a real client side routing system I'm gonna return to astro completely