Now let’s try adding more pages to your Astro site.
Create a about.astro file under src/pages
This file will create a new page that listens on the route /about
If you visit http://localhost:4321/about, it works:
It shows a blank page, but no error like you’d get if you went to a route not defined, for example http://localhost:4321/test:
Now you could add a simple HTML tag to the component, like we did before with the Test component:
If you open the DevTools you’d see a simple HTML structure, without all the <head> and <body> tags and everything that makes an HTML page “correct”:
(the DOCTYPE and the script were added by Astro automatically)
You could now add the HTML directly in the component:
But what you’d usually do is use a layout:
---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'
---
<Layout title='About'>
<p>test</p>
</Layout>
and the src/layouts/Layout.astro will provide the base markup shared with src/pages/index.astro too.
This is a common way to have a base layout.
You can have multiple layouts, for example if you want to have a layout for single pages, and a different one with a sidebar for blog posts. I have 4 different layouts in my site.
To link pages with each other we use plain HTML <a> elements.
So we can link back to / using:
---
import Layout from '../layouts/Layout.astro'
---
<Layout title='About'>
<p>test</p>
<a href="/">back to the home page</a>
</Layout>
Astro does not provide client-side navigation by default, so all links do a full-page refresh, like it happens in plain HTML pages.
However you can easily add view transitions to add client-side navigation, as we’ll see later.