I’ve been running my little corner of the internet on hand-coded HTML for a while now. And when I say “hand-coded,” I mean I literally copied and pasted HTML cards, navbars, and footers across every single page. It worked. The site was fast, clean, and did what I needed it to do.
But here’s the thing about copy-paste at scale: it breaks.
Add a link to the navigation? Better update it on 20 different pages. Fix a typo in the footer? Hope you find all the instances. Want to add a new blog post? Duplicate a page, change the content, pray you didn’t miss any IDs or classes. It’s fine when you’re managing 10 pages. It’s… less fine at 50.
I needed something better. And then Cloudflare acquired Astro last year, and the conversation shifted entirely.
Why This Matters (For A Non-Developer Sales Guy)
Here’s the kicker: I’m not a developer. I’ve spent the last nine years selling enterprise infrastructure at Cloudflare. I know what DNS does. I can talk about DDoS mitigation. I can explain why Durable Objects are better than Redis for certain workloads. But building a modern web framework? That’s not my lane.
Yet there I was, needing a site that actually scaled, built on technology my own company owns. You see where I’m going with this.
Cloudflare acquiring Astro in 2025 completely changed how I think about my own infrastructure. This isn’t some third-party framework we integrate with. This is ours. And in customer conversations, that matters. A lot.
When I’m sitting across from a VP of Engineering and talking about why Cloudflare is the best platform for modern web applications, I can now say: “We literally built the framework to prove it.” That’s not marketing speak. That’s just true.
What Is Astro, Actually?
Let me explain this in sales terms, not engineering terms.
Astro is a template system. You write your navigation once. You write your footer once. You write your layout once. Then every page that uses that layout gets it automatically. No duplication. No mistakes from forgetting to update something.
For blog posts, you just write markdown. A text file. Title at the top, content below. No HTML. No fussing with card components or styling. Astro reads the markdown, converts it to a page, and you’re done.
That’s it. That’s the magic.
The old way: I had to manually write HTML cards for each blog post. Every. Single. One.
The new way: I write markdown. Astro handles the rest.
The actual time difference? 15 minutes per post instead of 45. For someone who’s shipping content frequently, that compounds fast.
The Migration (Let Claude Do The Heavy Lifting)
Here’s my honest take: I didn’t do this myself. I used Claude AI with Cowork to convert the entire site.
I took all my existing blog posts, prepped them as markdown files with proper frontmatter (just title, date, tags — nothing fancy), and Claude handled the rest. Configured the AstroPaper theme (dark mode, built-in search, SEO-friendly, clean design), applied Cloudflare branding (dark background, orange accents), and deployed to Cloudflare Pages.
The whole process took a few hours. Not weeks. Hours.
Here’s what didn’t change: All my Workers are still running. The Ask chatbot? Still there. The Playground endpoints? Still hitting my Durable Objects on the edge. R2 storage, the AI integrations, all of it — exactly the same. Astro is just the frontend layer. It doesn’t touch the infrastructure.
That’s actually the best part about this. I wasn’t forced to rearchitect anything. My edge compute is still edge compute. My APIs still work. I just got a better way to render the static stuff — the blog, the home page, the portfolio — and keep it all DRY.
What Changed (And What Didn’t)
What Changed:
- Blog posts are now markdown. Easier to write, easier to version, easier to reuse.
- Layouts are reusable. The main blog template works for every post. Same with project pages.
- Adding new content is drag-and-drop easy. No HTML knowledge required.
- The site is more maintainable. Future-me will thank present-me when I want to tweak something.
What Didn’t Change:
- Performance. Still fast.
- Cost. Still free (Pages + Workers).
- APIs. Still working exactly the same way.
- The edge runtime. Still running Workers and Durable Objects.
- My ability to sell Cloudflare. Actually improved it.
The Sales Angle
Here’s why this matters beyond just “my site is easier to update now.”
In customer conversations, I can say: “Astro is used by Porsche, IKEA, and OpenAI. And I’m using it too — because Cloudflare owns it.”
That’s powerful. That’s not “we work well with popular frameworks.” That’s “we built the framework that the best companies in the world chose.”
It changes the narrative. Customers aren’t just buying into Cloudflare’s infrastructure. They’re buying into Cloudflare’s vision for what the web should be. Fast. Modern. Built on a platform that’s actually owned by someone who understands the business.
What’s Next
I’m going to keep shipping content. The markdown-based blog is already making it easier to post more frequently. I’ve got ideas for integrating more of the edge into the site (probably some fun stuff with Durable Objects and real-time data), and I want to push the branding even further.
Also: if you’re a Cloudflare customer thinking about modernizing your website, this is proof it’s possible. You don’t need to be a developer. You don’t need months of planning. You can legitimately migrate to a modern framework in a few hours, keep all your existing infrastructure, and come out the other side with something you actually enjoy maintaining.
Oh, and: Astro is really good at what it does. Don’t sleep on it.
Questions? Hit me up. The site is open-source-ish (or at least, I’m happy to talk about how I built it), and I’m always down to chat about Cloudflare, web infrastructure, or why hand-coded HTML at scale is a path to madness.