Choosing a Template Engine for Your Agency

If a web agency rebuilds the same infrastructure for every new project, the question "should we systematise this?" eventually becomes unavoidable. Here are the right questions to ask when evaluating a template engine:

1. How separate is content from code?

A good template engine separates content from code completely. A content change should not require a deploy; a component change should not cause content loss. In AstroForge, content lives in JSONs and code lives in Astro components — they don't know about each other.

2. Does it support multiple clients?

What agencies need isn't just a site template but a system that manages multiple client sites efficiently. Does the CMS require a separate setup per client, or does one system manage all clients?

3. How simple is deployment?

"Git push = site live" shouldn't be a luxury — it should be the standard in modern web development. Platforms like Cloudflare Pages automate this. Systems requiring a control panel login, FTP, or SSH in 2025 are no longer a competitive choice.

4. What about performance and security?

The security advantage of static sites is often overlooked. If there's no server-side code, SQL injection, SSRF, and code injection are impossible. For performance, pre-rendered HTML is always faster than server-rendered HTML.

5. What's the developer experience like?

TypeScript support, automatic schema generation, CLI scaffold tools — these directly affect developer productivity. Finding the answer to "how is this done?" shouldn't require 30 minutes of documentation reading.

6. What's the long-term maintenance cost?

Can the system built today be easily updated two years from now? Are dependencies staying current? How exposed is the plugin ecosystem to security vulnerabilities? The Astro + Cloudflare combination gives strong answers to all of these.