Static site search for Astro in 2026: why I picked Pagefind over Algolia and Lunr

Short summary

For static sites with 500–1,000 entries, the author chose Pagefind over Algolia ($49/mo) and Lunr.js because its lazy-loaded index keeps initial load to 30KB and costs nothing. Cloudflare Pages edge-caches everything as static files. Notable gaps: no query logging or fuzzy typo-matching.

• •Pagefind's chunked index with lazy loading reduces initial JS load to ~30KB vs Lunr's 2–4MB upfront
• •Cost: free deployment vs Algolia's $49/month per site
• •Trade-offs: no built-in query analytics or typo tolerance

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.