Migrating our company website to Astro

At the early stage of our company, more than 10 years ago, one of our most requested services was Wordpress sites, not only building websites for our clients in Wordpress but also developing themes and plugins to satisfy the very special needs of our clients. By that time, that was our second strongest service only after tailored software development, I personally was some kind of magician Wordpress developer (probably I still would be after undusting my mind about some WP concepts), there was nothing not doable for Techingenius when talking about Wordpress development.

Obviously, our web has been built on WordPress and stayed on that technology despite having had several changes and improvements with the passing of time.

WordPress is considered pioneer in the Internet community, is loved by developers and even not tech people, mostly by the ability to manage the content in a simple and convenient way through the WP admin dashboard.

In the last few months, we were feeling our webpage was missing something, not related to content (well maybe), but related to perception from the Internet users, maybe was lack of speed, maybe deprecated SEO tags, maybe a combination of those plus something else we don’t even know. All that feeling coincided with the time we started to hear about Astro, a tool conceived to build fast websites with no Javascript running under the hook (nor PHP if we talk about WordPress).

Why

Astro was voted as the most relevant new development tool of 2022 on Stack Share by many IT professionals, so as we always do with new technologies, we decided to give it a look to see if is something we can adopt in our tech stack to improve the quality of services we provide to our clients, after applying it in a couple of internal projects we loved Astro so much that we decided to migrate our website from WordPress to Astro.

How

So after the decision was made, hands to work, what is the plan? well, we didn’t hesitate, we did it from scratch, only saved some few content still valuable in our Wordpress site, and hands-on to a new site with Astro. This created the opportunity for a small rebranding of our website, content target refactoring, and SEO updates more oriented to nowadays.

Learnings

Astro is as capable as WordPress to be some kind of CMS thanks to the built-in content API and markdown features plus all the integrations available for several CMS alternatives.

What we love from Astro ❤️

• No learning curve for our team (if you ever have done an HTML site and have some basics of React or a similar framework, you are done).
• They said Astro is fast, we can confirm it ⚡️!!!
• Build-in content system is awesome, this blog post is proof of it
• You have markdown out of the box
• Easy to deploy (we used Netlify at the time of this post)

What we miss from Wordpress 🥲

• Not much to be honest
• Users management
• Hability to switch look and feel by changing a theme
• Don’t apply to us, due our site doesn’t required special functionalities but others might miss the chance to find a plugin for almost any need