Astro Weekly #70

400% faster rendering with Astro 5.3, build a chat app with Astro Islands, Michelin-star worthy entry in the Astro Showcase

Author

Nathan Lawson
February 16, 2025

In partnership with

Hello, Astronauts!

Welcome to another issue of Astro Weekly—this week’s all about speed!

Astro 5.3 has landed with massive performance upgrades. Plus, check out our guide on building a chat app with Astro Islands for ultra-fast interactions.

Let’s take a look! 🚀

What’s new with Astro 🗞️

Astro 5.3 puts the pedal to the metal

400% faster rendering with Astro 5.3 ⚡

Astro 5.3 is here, and the headline feature? 400% faster rendering! 

Thanks to a new parallelized renderer, Astro can now process pages at lightning speed, making big projects compile way faster.

Here’s everything that’s new in Astro 5.3:

  • 🚀 Faster SSR: Async components load only when needed, speeding up rendering.

  • 🔒 Session Storage: Automatically set up for user sessions, simplifying management.

  • ⚡ Netlify Optimizations: Better bundling control for faster performance.

  • 🧑‍💻 API Enhancements: Astro handles HEAD requests automatically, improving efficiency.

For the full rundown on Astro 5.3, check out the official release post.

Astro Boosters 🚀

Ready to level up your work with AI?

HubSpot’s free guide to using ChatGPT at work is your new cheat code to go from working hard to hardly working

HubSpot’s guide will teach you:

  • How to prompt like a pro

  • How to integrate AI in your personal workflow

  • Over 100+ useful prompt ideas

All in order to help you unleash the power of AI for a more efficient, impactful professional life.

Astro Community 🧑‍🚀

Chat apps without the bloat

Build a chat app with Astro Islands 💬

Learn how to build a fast, dynamic chat app using Astro Islands.

By leveraging Astro’s hydration directives with Stream’s chat API, you can create interactive components while keeping JavaScript bloat to a minimum.

One for the bookworms

Bring your Goodreads library to Astro 📚

Sadman Hossain shows how to pull Goodreads data into your Astro site, offering a step-by-step guide to fetching book info via the Goodreads API.

Perfect for anyone looking to add a book section or showcase favorite reads!

What caught my interest this week 🤓

Check out these great posts from the Astro Community ↓

If you have something awesome you’d like to share with the Astro community, you can reach me at [email protected] or via DM on X

Astro Boosters 🚀

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

What’s the secret to staying ahead of the curve in the world of AI? Information. Luckily, you can join 1,000,000+ early adopters reading The Rundown AI — the free newsletter that makes you smarter on AI with just a 5-minute read per day.

Astro on X 💫

What’s happening on Twitter X this week…

Astro Showcase 🤩

Check out these impressive projects built with Astro!

Michelin Group

Pioneering engineered materials for more than 130 years, Michelin is building the world’s leading manufacturer of life-changing composites and experiences.

www.michelin.com/en

Pricing Patterns

Real-world pricing page examples.

pricingpatterns.com

Would you like your work to be featured in our Astro Showcase? Get in touch at [email protected] or DM me on X

I’ll see you next week for a special announcement—don’t miss it!

Until then, Astronauts.

– Nathan 👨‍🚀