Why I Build Every Website on Astro (and Ditched Squarespace)

When I started building and publishing websites with AI, the first real fork in the road wasn't "what should it look like." It was "what do I build it on?" That choice, the framework, is invisible to your visitors, but it decides almost everything that matters later: how fast the site is, whether Google ranks it, whether ChatGPT quotes it, and how big the bill gets.

I tried the obvious things first. I'm a founder and marketer, not an engineer, so I reached for the website builders everyone reaches for. They work until they don't. They're slow, they lock you in, and they charge you every single month forever. So I went looking for what the people who actually build the internet use. The answer, over and over, was Astro.

What Astro actually is (and why it wins)

Astro is a free, open-source tool for building websites. Its one big idea is almost boringly simple: ship as little code to the visitor as possible.

That single decision cascades into the four things I care about most as a marketer:

• Speed. Pages are mostly plain HTML, so they load almost instantly. Fast pages keep visitors and rank better.
• SEO and AI-readability. Because the content is right there in clean HTML, not assembled by code after the fact, Google indexes it easily and AI engines can read and cite it. Answer Engine Optimization gets much easier when the page is genuinely simple underneath.
• Cost. Astro builds static-ish files that any host can serve cheaply, including Cloudflare's free plan, where hosting is $0.
• Forgiving for AI. The file layout is clean and predictable, so an AI coding agent like Claude Code rarely gets confused working in it. That matters a lot when the AI is doing the building.

One more thing people don't expect: you can run a real, custom content system on Astro, including a simple markdown-file-based CMS, so you (or your AI) write posts as plain text files and Astro turns them into fast pages. No bloated admin panel, no monthly CMS fee. This very blog works that way.

Hydrated islands, in plain English

Here's the objection I always hear. "Okay, a fast plain-HTML page is great for Google and AI, but I want a nice site. I want the search box, the slider, the interactive thing. Don't I have to give up speed to get delight?"

No. And this is the real reason Astro is special. It lets you have both, and the concept that makes it possible is called islands.

Most website builders do the opposite. They make the whole page heavy and interactive even when 95% of it is just text sitting still. You pay the speed tax on the entire page to get interactivity on one corner of it. Astro flips that. Static is the default, interactivity is the exception you opt into. That's why you don't have to choose between "fast and citable" and "delightful." You get both.

Astro vs Next.js, the honest comparison

If you've searched around, you've hit Next.js. It's the other big name, and it's genuinely excellent. So which one?

Short version: Next.js is built for applications, software with lots of moving, interactive parts (a dashboard, a social network, a SaaS product). Astro is built for content and marketing sites, blogs, landing pages, directories, business sites, where the job is to load fast and be found. They're both good. They're good at different jobs.

To be fair to Next.js: if you're building actual software, a product with logins, live data, and heavy interactivity, its power earns its complexity. But most of us, most of the time, are publishing pages. We want a fast site Google ranks and AI cites, for free, that an AI agent can build without tripping over itself. For that job, Astro wins, and it's not especially close.

Proof: this works, and you can switch to it

I don't just recommend Astro. I run on it. Two live examples:

• max-ship.com, the site you're reading right now. Astro and Cloudflare. Fast, citable, about $0 to host.
• thecouplesummit.org, a content-heavy site with a real blog, also Astro and Cloudflare.

The Couple Summit one is the proof that matters most, because it wasn't a fresh start. It was a switch. That site used to live on Squarespace at $40 a month. We moved it onto an Astro and Cloudflare build paying $0 a month for hosting. Same site, faster pages, and the bill collapsed to basically the price of the domain.

• $40old · Squarespace / mo
• $0new · Cloudflare host / mo
• 2live sites on Astro
• MITfree · open-source

How to start (or switch) without being technical

You don't write Astro by hand. You describe what you want and let an AI coding agent set it up, build it, and deploy it. Open Claude Code in an empty folder and paste this:

Set up a new Astro site for [describe my business in one sentence], optimized for speed and SEO, and ready to deploy to Cloudflare on its free plan.

Please:
1. Create a clean Astro project with Home, About, Services, Contact, and a Blog section.
2. Use a simple markdown-file-based setup for the blog so I can write posts as plain text.
3. Keep pages static and fast by default. Only add interactive "islands" where they're actually needed.
4. Add basic SEO and schema markup so AI engines can cite the pages.
Explain each choice you make in plain English as you go, and assume I'm not a developer.


End by asking me one question: "Which parts of this feel most uncertain — want me to explain them, or should I just build it for you?"

From there, deploying is one command your AI runs for you. If you want the full step-by-step (mapping the site, connecting Cloudflare, going live), that's the companion guide: how to build and publish a website with AI. Once it's live, the next two levers are getting cited by ChatGPT and seeing what visitors actually do with PostHog. If you get stuck choosing or setting it up, reach out. I'm always happy to help.