Webflow to Astro migration
Astro comes up more and more often as an alternative to Webflow. As a serious Webflow fan, I have to admit there are now projects where the platform has stopped being the best option, and the Astro framework is one of the reasons why.
Why people are looking at alternatives to Webflow
I have worked with Webflow for years, with teams of every size and technical level, and it is a genuinely great platform. What I keep seeing, though, is that nobody on those teams uses the Designer themselves. There is a learning curve, and people would rather not spend their time on a tool, which I completely understand.
Webflow's answer to this is components, and to a point it helps. In practice, though, no component system, however elaborate, ever removes the need to come back to a Webflow developer on a large project. Components cover the simple cases, and every new page tends to differ from the last one.
Meanwhile the same people have no trouble at all putting a page together through Claude or ChatGPT. The process of working on pages in that case is exactly what it should be, and it is hard to imagine anything better.
But Webflow has an MCP now
It does, and with a certain amount of persistence you can get some results out of it. It is a long way from the experience people get working with Claude or ChatGPT directly, and the MCP is essentially a layer built on top of the existing interface. Anyone claiming it delivers a revolutionary gain in speed, or changes the process for the better, has most likely not tried to build anything real with it.
So what is this Astro thing?
Any website ends up being a set of HTML files on a server, and that includes Webflow. The Astro framework is simply one way of working with those files. Used properly, it lets you reuse what has already been built, keep your content structured, and hold the whole project in good order.
In general you will forget it is there at all, because it never gets in your way. You genuinely stop thinking about it.
What a typical Astro project looks like
Webflow handles hosting for you: the HTML gets built from what you made in the Designer and served from Webflow's infrastructure. With Astro, that part is yours to arrange.
A good setup right now is to create the project through the AI assistant of your choice, keep the source in GitHub, and host it wherever you like. Cloudflare in particular gives you an excellent experience for pushing updates and working on the site day to day.
And what is it like to work on the site afterwards?
Because the files are no longer locked inside a proprietary platform, you can publish changes directly from your AI assistant. You do still need to keep an eye on whether what comes out fits the rest of the site, and the skills set up inside the project take care of part of that, so nothing unexpected slips through.
So does everyone need to leave Webflow?
No. I still believe in not touching what works, and in making changes only when the need for them is clear.
If you are planning a site of up to thirty or fifty pages with a blog updated every couple of weeks, then, however much it pains me to say it, you do not need Webflow. Astro is a full alternative for that.
With dozens of collections and hundreds of pages, a migration needs to be approached very carefully. The process is not quick, it demands a lot of attention, and things can get lost along the way. Moving for the sake of moving is unlikely to justify itself here.
Look instead at what specifically is not working for you in Webflow and deal with that directly, inside your current setup, rather than replacing the whole platform.
Is Astro all speed and no effort, then?
Not quite. Whether you are migrating an existing site or starting a new one from a Figma design, it takes a considerable amount of time up front, building the first pages and establishing the design system that every page after them is built from.
For all the intelligence of current models, they are still some way from working independently, without a human in the loop. More importantly, the architectural decisions at the start of a project are not theirs to make, and those decisions are what determine how comfortable and how fast the project is to work on later.
Getting that part right is exactly where I come in. Once the foundation is sound, building on the site is a breath of fresh air and new pages really do come together quickly.
Want to talk it through?
If you are interested in launching a new site on Astro, or in moving an existing site off Webflow, get in touch and we can look at whether there is a real need for it in your case.