Astro 7 landed on June 22, 2026, and the headline is performance. The release rewrites core parts of the build pipeline in Rust, moves to Vite 8, and reworks how pages render — and the result is build times that drop by 15 to 61 percent across real projects.
A bundler rewritten in Rust
At the centre of the release is Vite 8, which ships Rolldown — a Rust-based bundler that replaces the older esbuild and Rollup combination. Bundling is one of the slowest steps in any build, so moving it to a single Rust engine removes a long-standing bottleneck.
The component compiler goes native
The compiler that turns component files into JavaScript was rewritten from the ground up in Rust. On its own it makes compilation around six percent faster, and it sets the foundation for further speed work without changing how you write components.
Faster Markdown and content sites
Content-heavy sites get the biggest win. The Markdown and MDX pipeline now runs on a new Rust-powered processor called Sätteri, replacing the previous JavaScript chain. Sites with thousands of pages see some of the largest reductions in build time.
Rendering, now queued
Page rendering was rebuilt around a queue instead of deep recursion. The new engine is roughly 2.4 times faster at rendering and avoids the stack limits that recursion can hit on large pages, making output more predictable under load.
Full control over the request pipeline
A new entry point lets you take full control of how requests are handled before they reach a route. It is compatible with Hono-style middleware, so authentication, redirects, and custom headers can be expressed in a familiar pattern at the edge of the application.
A stable cache, anywhere
Route caching is now stable, with platform-agnostic directives that work the same way regardless of where the site is deployed. Experimental cache providers for major hosting platforms let pages be cached at the CDN without provider-specific code.
What breaks
The upgrade is not entirely free. Astro 7 no longer silently corrects invalid markup: unclosed tags, malformed attributes, and similar mistakes now raise errors instead of being patched. Whitespace between inline elements also collapses following stricter conventions, so a small number of layouts may need adjustment.
Upgrading
Existing projects can move over with a single command, npx @astrojs/upgrade, which updates the framework and its official packages together. For most sites the payoff is immediate: the same code, built and served noticeably faster.