Migrating To Astro

I’ve run Thought Eddies as a more dynamic, experimental blog since the beginning of this year. I’d heard about Astro and wanted to put a more personal touch on my web presence.

I wrote an article here or there and then one day, after I’d run into a bit of a block working on Tomo, I had the itch to build Thought Eddies out.

I have several post types I write frequently, so I needed to build sections for those. Then I added support for a bunch of the shortcodes I’d built over the years in Hugo as well as URL aliases. I try to keep all my old links alive and redirecting properly.

Combined with the strong ecosystem of Astro and LLMs, I was able to build and migrate nearly all the content within about a week.

One of the finishing touches was a search that I practically one-shotted with an agent, that was exactly what I wanted.

I wanted to build something like the search page on my previous site, which loaded all the site content client-side and did a client-side search as well. It wasn’t efficient but it worked and didn’t require a backend. I never had any problems with it and my site was building fast and loading fine.

So I added this search modal, triggered by ⌘+k on any page, I finished migrating over my content, and I started building and deploying the site. And wow was it slow. Almost three minutes on my local and almost 15 on CI.

What?

I started searching around and reading the Astro Discord, looking for reports of slow builds. My site isn’t big. There aren’t many images.

So I ran the build a bunch and started inspecting what was slow. One major problem were the number of Open Graph images I was generating.

I had a custom one per page.^[1]

That was not a great idea. Each took a few 100ms to build. I tried switching to a different library, started taking more than one second each.

Ok, no problem. One Open Graph image per site section will be fine.

The build was still taking more than two minutes.

At several points over the course of a few days, I opened devtools and viewed the site’s source. It didn’t fully load. Was Waterfox buggy? I didn’t really know.

I almost noticed the site was taking ~500ms to load. Just slow enough to be annoying.

Hugo (the static site generator I used to build my previous site) is quite fast and there is much discussion about how the Javascript web (and Astro by proxy) can be slow and bloated, but was it really this bad? I had never run into performance like this before. I’d built an Electron app of far greater complexity and even that tooling seems nicer than was I was running into here.

Eventually, I realized I needed to actually see the HTML source for myself. These were static HTML pages after all. To build the site, a webserver starts and a process requests the content for each page, then persists it as a static HTML file to be served in production.

What was taking so long?

I pulled down a page of the site and started to look around

curl "https://www.thoughteddies.com/posts/2025/find-the-groove" > out.html
vi out.html

I saw the page content, a bunch of CSS across the different components, some <path>s, and then I started to see my post content.

Not for the page I was on but for all of the pages across the site.

And then it dawned on me. My seemingly innocuous, static search required all the content from across my site for the client-side search to work.

Every HTML page contained the full content of the entire site.

Classic 🤦

Removing the search functionality from every page brought the site build time down to around 10 seconds total. By no means fast or reasonable all you web purists will tell me because the web is HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript and everything should be 10kb and load in milliseconds. But totally workable for me to build a blog with and have a fine time.