How to choose an Astro blog theme: 7 checks
You can spin up an Astro blog from the official starter in an evening. The trouble shows up a month later. There are twenty posts now, and you notice articles have no “updated” date, the home page has nowhere to pin an important piece, and every page shares the same description.
Here’s what we look at in a blog theme before launching anything on it.
1. Post format
Plain Markdown is fine for text and images. MDX lets you drop a component into a post: a comparison table, a callout, a buy button. If the blog is meant to sell, pick a theme with MDX.
2. Content schema
Astro keeps posts in collections, and each collection has a schema that says which frontmatter fields are required. Forget the description and the build stops and names the file. Without a schema, that post goes live with an empty search snippet.
3. SEO on the article page
The minimum: a unique title and description per post, canonical, Open Graph with an image, and a publish date. Open the demo, hit “View page source,” and look for those tags. Two minutes tells you whether you’ll be patching the head yourself.
4. Typography
People read blogs, mostly on phones. Check line length, spacing, lists, quotes, and code blocks on a small screen. An unstyled table will show up in your very first review post.
5. The home page
A plain feed of recent posts works for a personal journal. If the blog brings in clients, the home page needs a featured block for the posts that sell.
6. Tailwind CSS
With Tailwind, colors and spacing live in classes and tokens. If you already write Tailwind, rebranding the theme is an hour’s work.
7. The license
Read it before paying. How many projects, whether you can hand the site to a client, and what happens with reselling the source.
Marginalia against this list
Marginalia covers checks 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6:
- posts are written in MDX;
- the home page has a lead essay and recent writing;
- the article page is laid out for long reads;
- every post has its own SEO fields;
- styling is Tailwind CSS.
The license covers one project, personal or commercial, and you can hand the finished site to a client. Reselling the source isn’t allowed; the full terms are on the license page. It’s $19, paid once.