Rebuilding syntorium.com on Astro and Cloudflare Workers

The brief

The old syntorium.com was a purchased WordPress theme with Elementor and a slider plugin — 130 requests and three megabytes to render a homepage, demo content leaking into the sitemap, and a design that looked like what it was. The studio site should demonstrate the studio’s work. We rebuilt it with the same playbook we sell.

What we built

• Fully static Astro 7 build — every page pre-rendered; content (case studies, services, journal) in typed markdown collections, versioned in git, published by pushing to master.
• A tokens-first design system — the entire visual language in one CSS file: oklch palette, type scale, component classes. Logical properties throughout, so the Arabic build flips with dir="rtl" instead of a rewrite.
• One hydrated component — the animated circuit graphic, which pauses off-screen and respects reduced-motion. Everything else ships zero JavaScript.
• A deliberately small Worker — validates and relays the contact form via a transactional email API, answers 410 Gone for dead theme URLs, and serves the 404 page. The 301 map for every indexed WordPress URL runs at the asset layer.
• Zero third-party runtime requests — self-hosted fonts, no CDN scripts, no pixels; the only optional external call is cookieless Cloudflare Web Analytics.

Outcome

Measured on the same network, same day: requests down from 130 to 15, transfer from ~3 MB to 144 KB, the load event from 4.5 s to 0.65 s, TTFB roughly 4× faster. Deploys go from git push to the edge in under two minutes, and the whole site — content included — is reviewable in a pull request.