Most small business sites are either slow WordPress installs or rigid headless CMS builds. I wanted something fast, editable, and modern — so I built it with Astro + Contentful.
For small and medium businesses, the balance between performance and content flexibility is notoriously hard to strike. Traditional CMS-driven sites often come bloated and slow, while many “headless” setups are overengineered or too rigid for clients who just want to swap out a photo or update some text.
So I built a stack that solves that.
The goal: create modern, lightning-fast websites with developer-grade architecture that still empower non-technical users to control their content.
🛠️ The Stack
- Astro – For static site generation and partial hydration. Astro allows me to ship less JavaScript by default, which keeps load times fast and lighthouse scores in the 90s+ without breaking a sweat.
- TailwindCSS – For rapid UI development with a consistent design system that doesn’t bloat my CSS bundle. Utility-first isn’t just trendy—it keeps the codebase lean and manageable.
- TypeScript – For maintainability, reliability, and sanity. Strong typing helps future-proof client projects, especially when building reusable components and templates.
- Contentful – For structured content editing. Clients get a clean UI to manage content without touching code, and I get structured, queryable data I can render exactly how I want.
- Cloudflare Pages – For deployment and edge-caching. No vendor lock-in. Global performance without the cold sweat of wondering when my host will change pricing tiers.
No single piece here is groundbreaking on its own, but together they form a stack that delivers what SMBs actually need—a site that’s fast, editable, secure, and maintainable. Most importantly, it’s affordable to build and painless to hand off.
📊 Lighthouse Scores
Performance isn’t just theory — it’s measurable. I ran the starter project through Google Lighthouse on desktop, and the results speak for themselves:
Performance: 99
Accessibility: 96
Best Practices: 100
SEO: 92
Key metrics like First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint clocked in at 0.8s, with 0 ms blocking time. That means pages render quickly, interactions feel snappy, and there’s no hidden bloat slowing things down.
Astro’s “islands architecture” (hydrating only what’s interactive) paired with Tailwind and Contentful delivers a site that’s not just modern on paper, but proven fast, accessible, and search-friendly in practice.
🏗️ Architecture Overview
Astro renders pages at build time and only hydrates the components that need interactivity—like search bars, carousels, or contact forms. This keeps JavaScript payloads small, speeds up performance, and avoids the heavy, full-page hydration patterns common in older React workflows.
Contentful serves as the content API, which I query at build time. This gives business owners and marketing teams full control to update content (hours, bios, promotions, etc.) without touching code, while I maintain complete flexibility over design and logic.
Cloudflare Pages handles deployment and global edge caching directly from GitHub. It’s simple, cost-effective, and enables near-instant updates with webhook-triggered rebuilds.
⛪ Real Use: Church Website in Progress
I’m currently building out my church’s new website with this stack, and so far, development has been smooth and efficient. Non-technical staff are already uploading and managing content—event updates, sermon archives, etc.—without needing to touch code. Even in this early phase, we’re seeing clear performance improvements over their old WordPress setup. I’m excited to see the full launch come together soon.
🎁 Free Starter Template
If you’re a developer or freelancer building sites for SMBs — or just tired of wrestling with bloated CMS setups — I’ve open-sourced this starter template so you can hit the ground running.
👉 GitHub Repo – Astro/Contentful Starter
Try it out, fork it, or DM me if you’d like a walkthrough of how to make it your own.
This isn’t about selling a trend—it’s about delivering performance and control to the businesses that need it most. No compromises, no bloated backends, no unnecessary client dependencies. Just clean, modern web architecture that works.
