NextJS vs Astro: Choosing the right marketing site framework.

By Andrew on 8/2/2024

Every effective marketing site needs three key elements: speed, search engine visibility, and the ability to showcase content compellingly. As developers, our choice of framework can significantly impact these factors. In this analysis, we’ll evaluate NextJS and Astro based on:

1. Performance: How quickly does the site load and become interactive?
2. SEO capabilities: How well does the framework support search engine optimization?
3. Content management: How easily can we create and update content?
4. Developer experience: How efficient is the development process?
5. Scalability: Can the site grow with your business needs?

Let’s examine how NextJS and Astro stack up in each of these areas.

1. Performance

Performance for marketing sites is critical. Search engines use performance as one of the key determining factors of search ranking, especially for mobile. A faster site can mean better user engagement, better conversion rates, and better search rankings. Here’s are some results from different sites we aggregated:

Sources: Sparkbox, Brockherion.dev

Astro shows better performance across all metrics on most benchmarks online. Its near-instant Time-to-Interactive and zero Total Blocking Time are particularly impressive for marketing sites where quick user engagement is crucial.

NextJS, while not matching Astro’s speed, still performs well. Its 88/100 performance score is respectable, and for many marketing sites, the difference in load times may not significantly impact user experience.

2. SEO Capabilities

Both frameworks offer very strong SEO features, but their approaches differ.

NextJS provides:

• Automatic generation of meta tags
• Built-in routing for clean URLs
• Server-side rendering for dynamic content, which search engines can easily crawl
• Automatic sitemap generation

Astro offers:

• Static site generation, producing clean HTML that search engines prefer
• Easy integration of SEO meta tags
• Automatic generation of sitemaps
• Excellent performance scores, which indirectly boost SEO

It’s obviosu both frameworks support best SEO practices, Astro’s performance edge and clean HTML output might give it a slight advantage for content-heavy marketing sites.

3. Content Management

Efficient content management is crucial for marketing sites that require frequent updates.

NextJS:

• Supports dynamic content fetching, useful for frequently updated sites
• Integrates well with headless CMS platforms
• Offers API routes for custom backend functionality

Astro:

• Provides built-in Markdown support, excellent for content-heavy sites. This one is big for me…
• Allows use of multiple frontend frameworks (vue, react, etc…)
• Supports content collections for content management

Marketing sites with mostly static content, Astro’s Markdown support and content collections offers a better workflow. However, NextJS’s dynamic capabilities might be preferable for sites requiring real-time data or dynamic content changes.

4. Developer Experience

The ease of development can impact how fast you can launch and iterate on your marketing site. A lot of developers prefer to skip over this point, purely choosing what’s best for SEO, etc… But development experience matters and it’s what keeps us going!

NextJS offers:

• An ecosystem with extensive documentation
• Strong TypeScript support
• Hot module replacement for quick development
• Automatic code splitting

Astro provides:

• A simpler learning curve, especially for those familiar with HTML and CSS
• The ability to use components from various frameworks (No lockin)
• Zero-config TypeScript support
• Fast build times for quicker iteration

Really, both are fine for development. I’ve always found NextJS to be a bit clunkier with what features are available for SSR. It’s pretty straight forward with Astro, dynamic content needs to live inside a client-loaded component.

5. Scalability

As your marketing efforts grow, your site needs to be able to grow with them.

NextJS:

• Both static and dynamic rendering, allowing for complex applications
• Offers incremental static regeneration for large sites
• Backed by Vercel, ensuring ongoing development and support.

Astro:

• Focused on static sites, supports server-side rendering
• Allows gradual enhancement with interactive islands
• Growing ecosystem with active community development

It’s often nice having one tech framework for the entire stack, but the mix of SSR in places where your app doesn’t need it adds a lot of complexity. It might be better to use a single-page app framework in places where your marketing site gets more complicated than just static content.

Making the Right Choice

Both NextJS and Astro are capable of producing excellent marketing sites, but they excel in different areas:

Choose NextJS if:

• Your marketing site requires complex, dynamic features and serves more than just static content.
• You anticipate needing a full-fledged web application in the future

Opt for Astro if:

• Your primary focus is on content delivery and top-tier performance/SEO
• You want to avoid vendor lockin and have the ability to use multiple frameworks.
• Your marketing site is largely static with minimal dynamic components

Remember, the best choice depends on your specific marketing needs, your development team’s expertise, and your long-term plans for the site. We built our Django React Kit to use Astro for the marketing landing page and then transition over to a SPA when functionality was more complicated (authentication, payments, etc…). This creates a nice separation of concerns and allows you to push out content in markdown and focus your marketing site purely on speed and SEO (while not bogging down your backend). Both frameworks are actively developed and have strong communities, ensuring that whichever you choose, you’ll have a solid foundation for your marketing site.