Why I Picked Solid for This Site

I rebuilt my site this spring on SolidStart in Islands mode, and the choice has held up nicely so far. Two things sold me.

Static by default

Most pages here are essentially HTML documents. There is no reason to ship a client router, a hydration runtime for the entire tree, or a virtual DOM just to render a list of links. With Islands mode, the framework opts out of hydration by default and only sends JavaScript for the components I explicitly mark as islands.

The result: the home page above is a few KB of HTML. The only JS that ships is what powers the theme toggle, the cursor‑following label on the projects list, and the magnetic links in the intro paragraph. Everything else is real, final HTML, served from the edge.

Signals are honest

What I like most about Solid is that the reactive primitive is the model. A signal is a getter and a setter. A memo is a derived value. Components run once. Once you absorb that, the framework basically gets out of your way.

Below is a small island living inside this MDX file. The buttons mutate a single signal; two memos derive new values from it. Notice that nothing else on this page rerenders — the surrounding paragraphs, the section header, even the labels inside the box itself were created exactly once.

That is roughly the entire mental model. Most of my interactive bits on this site are about that long: a couple of signals, a memo or two, an effect at the edge.

What I gave up

Two real tradeoffs:

• No SPA navigation. Page changes are full document loads. I lean into this with the CSS View Transitions API, so the swap still feels soft. Try clicking back and forth between this post and the writing index — the title animates across.
• A young ecosystem. The MDX integration needed a tiny bit of configuration. Worth it for me; might not be worth it for everyone.

If any of this resonates, the source is on GitHub.