The previous stack: Hexo

I used Hexo for years. It was convenient, mature, and came with a large ecosystem of themes that made it easy to launch a decent-looking technical blog quickly.

When I first picked Hexo I did not have enough frontend experience to judge the trade-offs between frameworks, but it worked well for a long time because static rendering and SEO were built in by default.

Why I decided to migrate

After a long break from blogging, I came back with different expectations. I wanted a stack that stayed content-first but gave me more freedom over layout, rendering, and long-term maintenance.

Astro fit that goal very well:

• It is excellent for static, content-driven sites.
• It lets me mix Vue, React, SolidJS, and plain Astro components in one project.
• It gives me much more control over page structure and performance.

The fast page delivery also matters for SEO and for modern AI-based discovery flows, where quick and clean HTML responses are increasingly valuable.

AI changed the migration workflow

AI tooling made the migration much easier than it would have been a few years ago.

I first asked AI to analyze the old Hexo directory structure, then used it to help generate a migration plan, and finally let it assist with moving posts into the Astro project. Once the content was in place, AI also helped with the layout, styling, and search behavior.

What improved after the move

The search experience is better, the project structure is easier to maintain, and the design is now fully under my control.

I still tried to preserve the old permalink shape as much as possible, but Astro and Hexo do not normalize every Chinese punctuation mark in exactly the same way, so some routes changed slightly during the transition.

Overall, the migration was driven by three practical goals: better customization, better maintainability, and stronger SEO.