I have a new website. This one!
It is fast and sustainable, and fully multilingual.
Built to perform (with Astro)
I built it with Astro, an open-source web framework that emphasises performance used by companies like Porsche, NordVPN, Firebase, and Netlify for content-driven websites like blogs, portfolios, magazines, newspapers, and many e-commerce sites.
Performance is increasingly important for websites because:
- it helps lower bounce rates, improve SEO rankings, and conversion
- it is also tightly linked to how sustainable a website is.
Astro websites perform outstandingly because they ships less code to the browser than other frameworks like React, Preact, Vue, and Svelte.
This is not to say I see Astro as a competitor for those frameworks. Part of the beauty of Astro is that it allows you to combine components written in other frameworks into an Astro project, to support features requiring interactivity. For instance, the animation on this website page is built with React and Three.JS.
Rather than a replacement for other frameworks, I see Astro as a way to combine the best of different frameworks.
Multilingual
Additionally, the website is built on top of an (also) open-source Astro theme I built called AstroLingo.
AstroLingo aims to facilitate the management of multilingual websites using Astro. Multilingual websites take quite a bit of work underneath due to the need to automatically route content across sections and languages. If you need or want a multilingual site, blog, or portfolio, AstroLingo can save you many hours of work; days, even.
And it works! Just look at this site!
The challenge is now to keep content-creation rythm up. Multilingual websites require a lot of content! We’ll see how that goes.