Why I switched from Jekyll to Astro

I have been using Jekyll for a long time. And honestly, I loved it. It is simple, it is well designed, and it does exactly what a static site generator should do. For personal blogs and documentation sites there is very little that Jekyll does wrong. But I switched. And the reason is not Jekyll itself.

The real problem: Ruby

The problem is the Ruby ecosystem underneath it. I have not worked seriously with Ruby for more than seven years. My day to day work lives in Node, Python, shell scripts, and cloud tooling. Ruby just does not appear in my world anymore.

That would be totally fine, except maintaining a Jekyll site means also maintaining a Ruby environment. Bundler versions, gem conflicts, rbenv or rvm setup, outdated dependencies that break after a macOS update. Every time I came back to work on the blog after a few months, I spent the first hour just trying to get the build working again.

It felt like visiting an old apartment where nothing works the way you remember.

Node is where I already live

I keep my Node environment up to date all the time. It is part of my normal work, not something I manage separately.

So when I looked at Astro and saw it was Node-based, that was already a big argument in its favor. No new runtime to install. No separate version manager to remember. My existing toolchain just works.

What I found after switching

Astro is fast. The build times are noticeably better. The development server has hot reload and it is snappy. That matters when you are writing, because slow tools kill the flow.

The configuration is straightforward. I was able to set up Tailwind, MDX support, and syntax highlighting in a short afternoon. The documentation is clear and does not assume you already know the framework.

The community is active and helpful. When I had a question about an edge case in the content collections API, I found a good answer in the docs and in the Discord in under ten minutes.

What I appreciate most

The entire JavaScript and Node ecosystem is now available to me without any friction. If I want to add a search feature, a comment system, or a custom component, I am working in a space where I already have experience and where the tooling is mature.

And even though I am running this as a full static site today, I have the option to add server-side features or serverless functions later if I want to. That flexibility is genuinely useful. It means I am not locked into a decision I made two years ago.

Would I recommend it?

Yes, without hesitation, if you are already working in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Jekyll is still a great tool. If you are comfortable with Ruby and your setup works well, there is no urgent reason to move. But if you are like me, and Ruby only shows up as a maintenance headache, Astro removes that headache completely while giving you a faster and more modern experience.

The switch took a weekend and I have not regretted it once.