Astro 7.4 adds a build timings flag and splits image services

Astro 7.4 shipped on 15 October. The headline feature is astro build --timings, which prints a breakdown of where a build spends its time: build phases, Vite plugins, Markdown processing and syntax highlighting, page rendering, images and integrations, with slowest pages called out directly.

The release also lets a project configure separate image services for prerendered pages and on-demand ones, so you can run Sharp at build time and a different service, such as a CDN, at runtime:

export default defineConfig({
  image: {
    service: {
      build: { entrypoint: 'astro/assets/services/sharp' },
      runtime: { entrypoint: 'my-image-cdn-service' },
    },
  },
});

There’s a new notFound() handler for custom entrypoints, font providers can now report which weights, styles, subsets and formats they actually serve, and the minimum supported Node.js version moves to 22.22.0. Two experimental flags round it out: parallel prerendering across worker threads, and a customisable redirect page.

Why it matters: --timings turns “my build got slow” from a guessing game into something you can point at. Knowing which phase is expensive tells you whether parallel prerendering, a faster image pipeline, or neither is worth reaching for.

The caveat: parallel prerendering and the custom redirect page are both experimental, so expect their APIs to move before they stabilise.