Why I Ditched Next.js and Rebuilt My Site with Astro

The author rebuilt their portfolio site from Next.js to Astro after realizing they were shipping ~180KB of framework JavaScript (React runtime, Framer Motion, GSAP) just to render static blog content. Next.js's complexity overhead—including numerous markdown-processing dependencies and unnecessary client-side hydration—was excessive for a content-focused site. Astro's zero-JS-by-default approach, which renders everything to HTML at build time, proved a better fit for a blog that needs almost no client-side interactivity.