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InUterr0

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Building an SSR Marketing Agency Site with Astro 5

#tutorial

I recently rebuilt a marketing agency website using Astro 5 with server-side rendering, and I wanted to share the experience. The site is apexstudio.se — a Swedish SEO and web development agency.

Why Astro 5 for an Agency Site?

We had specific requirements:

  • Fast initial page loads for SEO credibility (an SEO agency with a slow site? No thanks)
  • Dynamic content for case studies and blog posts
  • Minimal JavaScript shipped to the client

Astro's island architecture was perfect. Most pages are pure HTML/CSS with interactive components only where needed.

SSR on Railway + Cloudflare

We chose SSR over static generation because we wanted:

  • Real-time content updates without rebuilds
  • Dynamic meta tags based on request context
  • Server-side redirects for multi-language support

The hosting stack:

Astro 5 (SSR mode) → Railway → Cloudflare (proxy + SSL)
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Performance Numbers

  • Lighthouse Performance: 98
  • First Contentful Paint: 0.6s
  • Total Blocking Time: 0ms (zero client JS on most pages)
  • CLS: 0

Astro's partial hydration means we ship almost no JavaScript. The client gets pure HTML + CSS for most pages.

Astro 5 Features We Used

Content Collections

Perfect for blog posts and case studies:

const collection = defineCollection({
  schema: z.object({
    title: z.string(),
    description: z.string(),
    publishDate: z.date(),
  }),
});
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View Transitions

Smooth page transitions without a SPA:

<head>
  <ViewTransitions />
</head>
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Image Optimization

Astro's built-in <Image> component with automatic WebP conversion saved us tons of bandwidth.

Lessons Learned

  1. Astro 5 SSR is production-ready — stable, fast, and easy to deploy
  2. Islands architecture is perfect for marketing sites — most content is static anyway
  3. Railway + Cloudflare is an excellent hosting combo for SSR Astro
  4. Content collections make managing blog posts and case studies a breeze

Check out the result at apexstudio.se. If you're building a marketing or agency site, Astro 5 is worth considering.

What's your experience with Astro for business sites? Let me know in the comments!

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