“Holy crap, that prompt just built a site in like 30 minutes! I’m gonna write a blog post about how I built a site in a day once this is done!”
That’s what I thought to myself like three weeks ago.
Now, here we are, and the site you’re reading this on is live after maybe 15–20 hours of work.
After building and working on WordPress sites for the last eight years or so, the seemingly glaring benefits of building a site with Astro were interesting, to say the least.
A quick search will give you videos and articles about how you can build entire Astro sites from a prompt, there’s little maintenance, and they’re super fast.
All those things are true.
Also, there were a bunch of things that just about caused me to pull my freaking hair out trying to get the site to look and work correctly.
When I was done, I wrote down a list of good and bad things about building my Astro site.
My hope is that if you’re thinking of building your own Astro site or if you’re a web designer or work at an agency, these are some unfiltered things you can consider first.
Let’s start with what sucked about building my site with Astro
The internet is full of pro-Astro stuff about how game-changing it is, etc., etc.
Frankly, a lot of that game-changing stuff is true, especially for agencies that build sites.
In my opinion, Astro very well may be the future, or part of the future, of building websites.
However, I first want to give my raw thoughts on some things that annoyed the shit out of me when trying to figure out Astro for the first time on my own.
Note that I had no experience with Astro going into this. I just started prompting to figure out what the heck to do.
So, I’m sure there are some things that could have been avoided, but here’s what happened.
The annoying, time-consuming process of tiny edits
At the start of this article, I said I built my site with a prompt in like 30 minutes.
That’s what the Astro process starts out like.
You can have AI build out a whole Astro site, all the pages, links, navigation, etc., in like 30 minutes.
Then, as you might imagine with most things AI, it’s just super generic.
The site looks generic, the content is generic, and it’s just boring.
Not wrong, but boring.
Mind you, I told it to model a site template I had chosen that looked cool and it did a good job of modeling the design.
But, similar to how you would start a WordPress site with a template, it’s just a template.
As my web designer friends know, sometimes you need to take a site quite far from the original template before getting to the final version.
So, I started tweaking things by prompting to do just that.
“Can you increase the spacing just a little bit between the header and first section?”
Done!
“No, that didn’t hardly do anything, increase the spacing more… I don’t know how many pixels it would be or something, just make it bigger”
Done!
“Holy shit, why did you move the second section half way down the page? Move it back so it’s just at like, I don’t know, the bottom of the screen when the site first loads? I don’t know how else to explain it to you.”
And this process went on and on for hours as I edited my site.
The point is: in a WordPress build, you may not always know exactly what you want.
Part of a site build is just sitting there adjusting things until you get it to look how you envision it.
With Astro, that “editing” process is done by literally describing what you think you want.
Over and over.
Until you’ve pretty much lost your voice from describing edits.
That brings us to the next point.
Having web design knowledge will (drastically) help you
Having worked as a site build project manager for years, I inherently know how to describe different aspects of a site.
I’m referring to things like padding, spacing, heading types, section names, etc.
So, when you go through the (sometimes) painstaking Astro editing process to try to get things to look how you envision, that will make a huge difference.
The difference I’m referring to is mainly about time.
Because you’re working with AI, it helps to describe things very specifically.
Ideally, you want to describe things using specific “web design language” instead of speaking conversationally.
When you don’t, I quickly learned that it just starts applying edits to shit that you didn’t ask for or just doesn’t edit what you wanted at all.
So, in my opinion, because of this aspect alone, I don’t think a bunch of non-tech-savvy people are going to pick up Astro and just start busting out amazing websites.
At least, they’re not going to without spending a ton of time to do so, which is probably good news for keeping agencies in business.
The image sizing issue that made me yell at the computer
Now, the most frustrating thing I experienced when building my Astro site: making this About page.
If you look at the page, you’ll see that there are “Polaroid-looking” photos spread down the page with a slight tilt to them, light borders to make them stand out, and they’re on alternating sides of the text. The image placement also varies between desktop and mobile devices.
Making my About page look like this was a little test to see if I could get Astro to build something more unique.
A test it was indeed…
I think the best way to explain what happened here is to literally show some of my exact messages with ChatGPT while building this:
“Okay, I don’t understand because none of your permissions or anything changed from earlier in the chat. So what do I need to do for you to push this directly to GitHub?”
“Okay, the picture is all pixelated on the page now for some reason. Can you re-upload with this one?”
“Okay, the image is still messed up. Replace it with this all new image”
“I don’t understand why you keep stopping or what the hell that you want from me. Go all the way through until the image that I gave you is updated on the site.”
“You did the same thing where the spacing is all fucked up. So now the text of the paragraph is, like, really thin and condensed. Copy the spacing/width that you use for the paragraph and photo that starts with this sentence: “My job at…” Then, apply that to the section we just updated that starts with this sentence: “Around 5 years after…””
“No, stop giving me code, you have Github access. Apply it directly to Github”
So, hopefully these messages show you a little taste of what life was like going through the Astro editing process.
Making little tweaks sucks and is time-consuming.
Alright, enough Astro hate. Here’s what made this site build awesome
When you first start an Astro site, you can connect ChatGPT or Claude to a development workflow and GitHub repository.
Once connected, you just describe what you’re building a site for, and you can give it some Astro themes to work from.
You send the prompt, wait like 10 minutes for it to load, and open up the site on “localhost” in your browser.
Boom.
A fully built-out, stylish website with navigation, links, the whole deal, all in less than an hour.
In my opinion, this is monumental for web designers or agencies who build sites for clients.
The time (and ultimately cost) savings of being able to get the foundation of a custom site built out this quickly are basically undeniable.
It’s for this reason that, despite my previous complaints about how edits can suck and be time- consuming, I think the overall build process will likely take less time than a WordPress site build.
From an agency perspective, building sites with Astro vs. WordPress may be able to shave hours off the build process while still providing the same (or better) quality custom sites for clients.
So, you save money on labor costs and still deliver a premium-quality site…
With a better-quality prompt to start, you can reduce the build time even further
All the things I previously described as sucking about my Astro build were related to making edits after the initial build was in place.
So how do you make an Astro build even faster?
Reduce the number of edits you have to make in the first place.
If I were going to start a new Astro site, I’d start by giving it as much info as I could in the initial prompt.
Actually prepare the homepage content, About page, service pages, etc., with as much info as you can.
As an agency, a potential workflow to get the info for those pages would be an interview-style kickoff call with the client.
Ask them a ton of questions about their business, services, everything.
Take the transcript from that and have AI turn it into actual page content for all the core site pages.
Then, feed those pages to the chat you’re using for the Astro build.
It’s then going to have a substantial amount of info on the business and it will simply apply that (all-original) info to a stylish site design to display it.
At that point, you won’t be starting with the “generic site, generic content” that I described for my own site at the beginning of this article, but potentially a nearly finished custom site in just a couple hours of work.
Site maintenance, load speeds, and other headaches you won’t have to worry about as much
Coming from a WordPress background, it’s kind of weird to understand how an Astro site even works.
There are no WordPress-style plugins, updates, or “backend” to manage. You’re essentially building a site that Astro turns into HTML pages, then deploying those pages to the live website.
Therefore, those are all things you don’t have to work on as much when maintaining an Astro site.
In addition, because it’s primarily just HTML pages, Astro sites are typically super freaking fast.
There’s typically less code for the browser to load and process, so it doesn’t have to do nearly as much work to display pages, making load times faster.
Finally, beyond the SEO benefit of a site that loads quickly, search engines can easily crawl and understand the content of an Astro site.
You can literally build in SEO elements like title tags, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, and structured data just by prompting to include it in the site.
So not only can Astro make it faster for your web developer to build a site, but it can make things easier for your SEO guy to manage as well.
The most controversial topic about Astro sites: Client access
Reading about Astro sites online, you’ll pretty quickly find people arguing about how their clients can access their site themselves, make edits, or whether clients should even be able to make their own site edits at all.
The challenge here is that some clients like to edit their site and some don’t mind asking you to make changes for them.
If you don’t allow clients to edit their Astro site, you’re now the person all their requests have to go through.
If you do want clients to edit their Astro site, you’ll typically need to add a CMS to give them a dashboard, which can introduce setup complexity and costs.
As I currently understand it, the client can then edit their Astro site through the CMS, but I’ve read that it can be challenging to actually change Astro pages structurally with new sections, layouts, etc. through a CMS.
The takeaway for agency owners here would be: Astro doesn’t include a client-friendly editing system out of the box, so you’ll have to decide if or how to provide one to your clients.
Should agencies switch to building sites with Astro? It depends.
Everything I’ve talked about in this article was in reference to me building a simple personal website.
For an agency that primarily builds sites for small businesses, I don’t think the process would be much different from my build.
Take a service business, like a med spa, for example.
You have a homepage, about page, some service pages, maybe a blog, and a contact page.
For a site like this, I think you’ll realize the cost benefits of using Astro over WordPress pretty easily.
Now, just based on my limited experience of building my site, I have to imagine it would be significantly more challenging to build sites like:
- E-commerce sites
- Membership sites with logins, subscription payments, etc.
- Marketplaces or job boards with listings, messaging, etc.
I’m not saying those sites are impossible with Astro, but those seem like they would be an undertaking given what I’ve experienced with Astro up to this point.
However, as with all things AI, things are constantly evolving (and improving).
So, would I build another site with Astro?
Yes.
Despite the hours I spent yelling at ChatGPT to move an image or fix spacing, I was able to build a foundationally solid site in less time than I would have with Wordpress.
For agencies building relatively simple websites for clients, I think there’s an opportunity here to reduce build times and costs while still delivering high-quality sites.