Work · Web · 2026
Rebuilding syntorium.com on Astro and Cloudflare Workers
Our own site, rebuilt from a heavyweight WordPress theme into a fully static Astro build on Cloudflare's edge — with a measured −95% page weight, a tokens-first design system, and a tiny Worker for the contact form and legacy redirects.
Result
0.65 s full load, down from 4.5 s.
Page weight down 95%.
- Client
- Syntorium
- Sector
- Web
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Design-to-code + infrastructure
- Length
- In-house
- Team
- 1
Brief and outcome
What was needed.
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 came of it.
Measured at launch in August 2026, 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.
What was built
5 parts,
shipped.
A selection of projects shipped through Syntorium and our CTO's prior engagements.
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
Colour, type and space as CSS custom properties, and one plain stylesheet for the whole site. Logical properties throughout, so the Arabic build flips with dir="rtl" instead of a rewrite.
No framework at run time
Every page is HTML and CSS. The one script is the brief form's, and the form works without it.
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.
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Sunday to Thursday, 09:00–18:00, GMT+4. Remote engineers cover the EU and the US asynchronously. We work in English, Arabic and Urdu.