What's new in Astro - March 2026

Some exciting news from around the Astro ecosystem this month, including:

Updates from Mission Control
Latest releases
Astro Adopters
Weird Wide Web
Cosmic Canvas
Community updates
Reading List
Watch Party
Tips & Tools
Site Showcase
Starlight in the wild
Themes & Templates

Let’s dive right into it!

Updates from Mission Control

Astro 6.0 is released and you can check out the v5 -> v6 upgrade guide
CloudCannon supports Astro as a featured CMS partner
Astro Together: London - Join the Astro core team for a showcase of new and upcoming features on April 9, 2026.

Latest releases

Major releases introduce breaking changes, stabilize features, and provide improvements. Minor releases introduce new features and improvements. Check out what’s new!

Astro 6 is here with a refactored dev server, an experimental Rust compiler, live content collections, CSP, and more.
Astro 6.1 - More control over image optimization, more Markdown configuration options, updated hooks for working with i18n, and more.
Starlight 0.38 updated for Astro 6, improved header link styling, improved CJK font rendering, and more.

Astro Adopters

From Bricomarché to Svenska Dagbladet, some of the biggest sites from around the globe are using Astro.

See more companies using Astro in our site showcase, and explore Astro for corporate or enterprise use with one of our agency partners.

Weird Wide Web

Some sites from the last month that show off what you can do with Astro that are quirky, innovative, inspiring, empowering, or just plain fun.

Cosmic Canvas

Didn’t think you could do that with Astro? These stunning sites with spectacular visuals and smooth animations prove you can.

Astro Team News

Join the Astro core team for a unique event showcasing new and upcoming features in the heart of London on April 9. Register for the event on the Astro Luma page and secure your spot today!

Astro core maintainer Matt Kane gave a talk about the future of Astro and you can catch up on the Vue.js Amsterdam Day 2 live stream replay.

Astro maintainer Kenji provided an easy-to-understand explanation of the internal implementation of Astro Islands at the March Vue.js Japan User Group meetup.

CloudCannon Challenge Winners

This month, CloudCannon showed off their new Astro Component Starter and issued a challenge to the Astro community to transform the Component Starter into an incredible web page.

The three prizes of $1,500 USD were awarded to:

Felix Schneider for trueberryless-org
Lawrence_sticks for Kairos
David V Kimball for Signal

Congratulations to everyone! What will you build with the Astro Component Starter?

Shout-outs

Think we don’t notice you? Think again! This month, we’d like to give some 🌮 to:

@rururux for contributing helpful PRs!
@AitorMT and @mochi-yu for updating translations to Astro’s docs!
all of our theme authors for working so hard to update so many of their existing Astro themes to v6!

Content

Here’s what caught our attention this month:

🧑‍⚖️ Read how Iulia Iacoban undertook the Experian website migration, ultimately choosing Astro: The Framework That Didn’t Judge Our Legacy Code after developing several proof of concepts on different stacks.
🌟 Think Starlight is just for documentation sites? Think again! Writing Markdown daily, both for personal notes and at work, a personal site built on WordPress felt increasingly out of place for Paweł Cisło. Migrating to Astro Starlight transformed the site into a digital garden and personal knowledge base that was worth every commit.
🔮 xergioalex walks through his upgrade experience in Migrating to Astro 6: Was It Worth the Wait? You’ll have to read to find out! But he does believe that Astro and Svelte are the future of web development, so it probably was.
⚗ Robert Camden walks through Testing Live Content Collections in Astro V6 using The Movie Database (TMDB) API.
🔍 Is Astro good for SEO? Lucky Media thinks so, and explains why it matters, and why Astro outperforms other frameworks.
🎮 Martin Patino built a DOOM clone with vanilla JavaScript in one HTML page: no bundler, no game engine, no npm packages. Just the Canvas 2D API and time. Hell Crawler is a top-down dungeon shooter, and the whole thing lives inside a single <script is:inline> tag in an Astro page.

Because you can never get tired of Astro, here’s even more community content:

Migration Stories

Case Studies

How-to Articles

Find these and all how-to articles from previous monthly blog posts at Astro Tips.

… and more!

Watch Party

Be sure to follow Astro’s official YouTube channel for content from the team.

Astro on demand

Grab your popcorn and make a playlist of your faves! 🍿

Live coding streams

Watch people build, experiment, and learn!

This month saw several new goodies for managing your content and UI:

Some of the latest community-built integrations to help you build with Astro. 🛠

Backstro Email Compose email templates with Astro components — a direct port of react-email component to native .astro syntax.
Review Loop - A dev-only annotation overlay for reviewing rendered sites and feeding corrections to AI coding agents.
Astro Techradar - An interactive, fully static technology radar built with Astro. Track technology adoption decisions with a visual radar chart — driven entirely by Markdown files.
NPM Astro Render Component - Astro component renderer. Zero configuration. Produces clean HTML strings directly in Node.js without any DOM environment.
Lexington SEO - Render SEO tags in your page <head> using a single AstroSeo component.
Astro Markdown Export - An Astro integration that exports content-collection Markdown files at build time and enhances their frontmatter with optional source URLs and extra metadata for bots, crawlers, AI agents, and other tools.
Astro Reveal - Beautiful scroll-reveal animations for Astro with zero JavaScript in production. GPU-accelerated, performant, and accessible.
Neokit - An Astro component library that automatically injects Tailwind + DaisyUI into your project — no manual CSS imports needed.
Astro Bundle Budget - Build-time JS/CSS bundle size budgets for Astro. Inspect every asset and page payload at the end of astro build — and optionally fail CI when you exceed your thresholds.
LCARS Stylus - LCARS inspired design system built with Stylus.
Astro Icon Sprite - Build-time SVG compilation into a runtime sprite sheet.
Astro Stacks - A Laravel Blade-style @stack / @push / @pushOnce system for Astro SSR.
Astro MD Alternate - An Astro integration to serve Markdown versions of content pages for AI agents and LLMs.
Astro Securitytxt - An Astro integration that automatically generates an RFC 9116 compliant security.txt file during your site build.
Astro Class Shortener - An Astro integration to minify and mangle CSS class names across HTML, CSS, and JS files.
Astrobit - A thin framework for running MoonBit components as Astro islands.
JAAMD - Just Another Astro Markdown — remark plugins, client-side enhancements and styles as a single Astro integration.
Agent Markup - Build-time llms.txt, JSON-LD, Markdown mirrors, AI crawler controls, and validation.
CoCart Headless SDK - Build headless WooCommerce storefronts through its API instead of using PHP templates.
Astroscope Hyperspace - Pre-compressed in-memory static file serving for Astro SSR. Save space, serve from hyperspace.
GreenLight VSCode extension - A visual drag-and-drop HTML editor for Markdown, HTML, and Astro components.

CMS/Text Editors

Astro MD Editor - If you store content in src/content, this gives you a local editor UI focused on fast Markdown/MDX editing plus schema-driven frontmatter controls, including custom types like image/color/icon.
Galaxy Brain - A starter template for publishing your Obsidian vault as an interactive 3D knowledge graph website.
Astro Blocks - A block-first CMS. Pages, menus, settings and uploads stored in JSON, with your own Astro components as blocks.
Decap CMS OAuth Astro - Astro integration for Decap CMS (or any compatible CMS like Sveltia) with custom OAuth backend.

Content loaders

AT Astro Loader - AT Protocol-powered loaders for Astro content collections.
Astro Loader Sveltia CMS - A Sveltia CMS integration for Astro 6 that serves the Sveltia CMS admin UI and provides a content loader for Astro’s content collections.

Astro Image Inspector - Astro Dev Toolbar app that lets you inspect images on hover during local development: see actual size, render size, loading mode, and common warnings (upscaled, oversized source, missing dimensions).
Instruckt Astro - A dev toolbar app for visual annotation feedback for AI coding agents in Astro. Click on any UI element, leave feedback with optional screenshots, and let AI agents read and fix issues.
Astro Toolbar UA - Astro dev toolbar app for switching user agent strings.
Astro Caliper - An Astro dev toolbar app designed to assist developers in converting designs to code with visual aids and inspection tools directly within the browser.
Astro Dev Toolbar JSONLD - An Astro Dev Toolbar app that detects, displays, and validates JSON-LD structured data on your pages during development.
Astro Env Inspector - A dev toolbar integration that shows all your environment variables — grouped, masked, and searchable — directly inside astro dev.
Astro Toolbar Routes - A dev toolbar integration that shows a live, clickable route map of your entire project — grouped by type, searchable, and active only in development.
Astroscope - A collection of Astro integrations for common server-side needs — logging, tracing, security, i18n, and more.

Browse all new additions this month in our integrations directory.

… and some built with Astro: utility sites from the last month that get the job done.

Showcase

Looking for even more inspiration? See all the community member websites submitted to the Astro showcase this month. Submit your site built with Astro!

Want your site to be included? Submit it to the Astro Showcase Site.

Starlight in the wild

It’s always exciting to stumble across more docs built with Starlight. Here’s what our community noticed this month:

Spot someone using Starlight for their docs? We want to know about it! Submit it to the Astro Showcase Site.

Themes & Templates

For the entire month of March, we temporarily paused new theme submissions to give our theme authors a chance to update their existing themes to v6 instead. And wow, did they follow through! Grab a coffee and start scrolling through some of your favourite past themes that are v6 ready…

You can find these newly updated themes and more in the Astro theme catalogue. Get a jump start on a fresh new project by starting with a theme!