Introduction
Hey there, and welcome to Alight Read—the official blog for Alight, where we share insights about digital marketing, design, and all sorts of exciting stuff to help your brand shine. Today, we want to give you a quick rundown of why we chose Astro to power our blog. Spoiler alert: it’s all about speed, flexibility, and making your reading experience as effortless as possible!
What is Astro?
If this is your first time hearing about it, Astro is a modern static site builder that helps developers create super-fast websites. It focuses on delivering just the necessary amount of JavaScript (and often less!) to keep your site lightweight and highly performant. This means that when you visit any page on Alight Read, most of the heavy lifting happens before the page is even sent to your browser.
We’re all about making sure our blog is a breeze to explore. With Astro, you can scroll through articles without feeling like you’ve run a marathon (cough, slow scripts, cough).
Why We Chose Astro
1. Performance First
Have you ever clicked on a blog post and felt like it took an entire century to load? Nobody’s got time for that. Astro’s approach to partial hydration means that only the most critical parts of the page get JavaScript. By doing this, our blog loads lightning fast, which leaves more time for you to read and explore instead of waiting on spinners.
2. Developer-Friendly
At Alight, we’re big fans of productivity. Astro lets our developers write in the languages and frameworks they’re already comfy with, like Tailwind CSS for styling and shadcn/ui for component design. The code is neat and organized, and it’s easier for us to ship updates and new posts without breaking things.
3. Minimal Footprint
We love that Astro doesn’t force us to install a bunch of plugins or libraries we don’t need. Want to add a fancy table of contents? Sure thing. Need to keep the blog minimal for easy reading? Also super easy. Less bloat means you get a nice, clean reading experience, and we can iterate on new features without rummaging through “framework baggage.”
4. Perfect for Static Sites
Since we’re essentially publishing articles (i.e., static content), Astro is a match made in heaven. We can write our posts in Markdown (like this one!), or MDX if we want to embed React components. Then Astro builds everything into static HTML, which is simpler to host and blazing fast for you to access.
Pro tip: We can still do dynamic things, but having a strong static foundation for a blog is a big win.
Our Vision for Alight Read
Our goal with Alight Read is to provide helpful, entertaining, and easy-to-digest articles about everything in digital marketing, design, and more. We want you to grab a coffee (or tea, your call) and enjoy reading without hurdles like:
- Annoying load times
- Half-baked features that never quite work
- Overly complex design that gets in the way
In short, Astro helps us deliver our content as seamlessly as possible—so you can focus on the juicy tips and tricks we share.
Wrapping Up
At Alight, we pride ourselves on pushing boundaries and innovating with our clients’ brands. Astro fits right in with our ethos by helping us build a blog that’s both lightweight and powerful. We think you’ll appreciate the clarity and snappiness it brings to Alight Read.
Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you’re just as excited to explore our blog as we are to create it. Got questions or want to learn more about our approach? Feel free to reach out anytime or drop a comment (in spirit—we may be minimal, but we’re always listening).
Stay awesome,
Tito Febus