Why We Build on Sanity, Astro, and Cloudflare

The Stack That Changed Everything

Most web agencies pick a stack and stick with it for years. WordPress, Drupal, maybe a React framework with a traditional CMS bolted on. It works, but it comes with baggage — bloated pages, expensive hosting, security patches that never end, and performance that degrades the moment traffic spikes.

We took a different approach. We built our delivery platform on three tools that each solve one problem exceptionally well: Sanity for content management, Astro for the frontend, and Cloudflare for hosting and distribution. Together, they produce sites that load faster, cost less to operate, and scale without intervention.

Sanity: Content Without Compromise

Traditional CMS platforms force you into their way of thinking. Your content lives in their database, displayed through their templates, constrained by their plugin ecosystem. When requirements change, you fight the platform instead of building what you need.

Sanity flips that model. It's a headless CMS — your content is structured data accessible through an API, completely decoupled from how it gets displayed. The editing experience is a real-time collaborative studio that content teams actually enjoy using, and the content model is fully customizable to match exactly how your organization thinks about its information.

For us, this means every project starts with the right content architecture. Blog posts, service pages, team profiles, case studies — each content type is modeled precisely for the business, not shoehorned into a generic post-and-page structure. When the marketing team needs a new content type six months later, we add it to the schema without rebuilding anything.

The generous free tier covers most small-to-medium sites entirely. No hosting fees for the CMS. No database to manage. No security patches to apply. The content just works.

Astro: Speed Through Simplicity

The web development world has a JavaScript problem. Modern frameworks ship megabytes of client-side code to render what amounts to a brochure site. Users wait for bundles to download, parse, and execute before they see content that was known at build time.

Astro takes the opposite approach. It renders everything to static HTML at build time and ships zero JavaScript by default. When a page needs interactivity — a contact form, an animated component, a dynamic widget — Astro's island architecture loads only that specific component's JavaScript, only when it's needed.

The result is measurable. Pages that would score 60-70 on Lighthouse with a typical React framework score 95-100 with Astro. Time to First Byte drops to milliseconds. Largest Contentful Paint happens almost instantly because the browser receives ready-to-render HTML instead of a JavaScript bundle that has to build the page from scratch.

For content-driven sites — which is most of what businesses actually need — this approach is dramatically faster and simpler. Astro pulls content from Sanity at build time, generates optimized HTML pages, and the result is a site that feels instant on any device and any connection.

Cloudflare: Enterprise Infrastructure at Startup Prices

Here's where the economics get interesting. Traditional web hosting means paying for a server that sits in one location, handling every request regardless of where the visitor is. When traffic spikes, you either over-provision (expensive) or your site slows down (bad for business).

Cloudflare Pages deploys your site to over 300 edge locations worldwide. When someone in Tokyo visits your site, they get served from a data center in Tokyo. Someone in London gets served from London. The content is already there, pre-built and cached, ready to deliver in single-digit milliseconds.

The pricing model makes this even more compelling. Cloudflare Pages offers unlimited bandwidth on its free tier. No bandwidth charges. No per-request fees. No surprise bills when a blog post goes viral. For most business websites, the hosting cost is literally zero.

Compare that to a managed WordPress host at $30-100 per month, or a traditional cloud VM at $20-50 per month that still only serves from one region. The Cloudflare deployment is faster, more reliable, globally distributed, and free.

How They Work Together

The real power is in the integration. Content editors work in Sanity Studio — a clean, modern interface that runs in the browser. When content changes are published, a webhook triggers Astro to rebuild the affected pages. Cloudflare deploys the updated site to its global network within seconds.

The entire pipeline is automated. No FTP uploads. No server restarts. No cache purging. Content goes from editor to live site in under a minute, served from the nearest edge location to every visitor on the planet.

Because everything is pre-built static HTML, there's no server to hack, no database to breach, no PHP vulnerabilities to exploit. The attack surface is essentially zero. The site is as secure as the edge network serving it — which, given Cloudflare's security infrastructure, is about as secure as it gets.

The Cost Comparison

A typical WordPress site for a small business runs $50-200 per month for managed hosting, plus plugin licenses, plus ongoing maintenance for updates and security patches. Performance is mediocre. Scaling for traffic is expensive.

Our stack runs at a fraction of that cost. Sanity's free tier covers content management. Cloudflare Pages hosts and distributes the site globally for free. The only ongoing cost is our time to maintain and update the site — and because the stack is simple and modern, that takes far less effort than wrestling with WordPress plugins and PHP updates.

The sites we deliver aren't just cheaper to run. They're faster, more secure, and easier to maintain. That's not a tradeoff — it's a straight upgrade.

Why This Matters for Your Business

Your website is often the first interaction someone has with your organization. If it takes three seconds to load, you've lost them. If it goes down during a traffic spike, you've lost them. If it gets hacked because a plugin wasn't updated, you've lost more than visitors.

The Sanity-Astro-Cloudflare stack eliminates these risks while reducing costs. It's the same technology powering sites for companies that serve millions of visitors, available at a price point that works for businesses of any size.

Performance shouldn't be a luxury. With the right architecture, it's the default.