Why we build Forge sites on Astro

Every site Forge ships is an Astro site. That isn’t an aesthetic preference — it’s the constraint that makes the rest of the product possible. A marketing site has to be fast, crawlable, and cheap to maintain by a small team. Astro is the only framework that gives us all three without a fight.

Islands, not a single-page app

Most of a marketing page is static: a hero, some features, a pricing table, a footer. Shipping a megabyte of JavaScript to render text is a tax your visitors pay in battery and bandwidth. Astro renders everything to HTML at build time and hydrates only the interactive islands — a theme toggle, a pricing switch, a search box.

// This is the only JS that ships for the pricing section.
export default function PricingToggle({ onChange }) {
  const [annual, setAnnual] = useState(true);
  return <button onClick={() => setAnnual((v) => !v)}>...</button>;
}

You choose when each island loads with a client directive:

Directive	Loads when	Good for
client:load	immediately	theme toggle, nav
client:idle	the browser is idle	search, command menu
client:visible	it scrolls into view	FAQ, counters
client:media	a media query matches	mobile-only menus
client:only	never on the server	charts, anything DOM-bound

The content layer is a build-time database

Astro’s content collections validate your Markdown frontmatter against a Zod schema and give you a typed API to query it. A typo in a blog post’s author field fails the build, not production.

Combine that with the issue → PR → live loop and you get a marketing site where the content and the code are both reviewed before they ship.

What it costs

Near nothing. The page you’re reading ships only the JavaScript for the theme toggle and the navigation. Everything else is HTML and CSS — which is exactly what a marketing site should be.