Your website is the digital face of your company. Oftentimes, it’s also the first place potential customers engage with your business. Yet many of today’s websites are built with the structure of a traditional database-driven site like WordPress. This type of website can be clunky, slow to load, a hassle for developers to maintain, and vulnerable to hackers. A static site can address many of these issues and may better serve your website needs. Learn how to connect your CMS to a Static Site in 3 steps.
A static website uses server-side rendering to serve pre-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to a web browser, in contrast to traditional dynamic sites that work by rendering the webpage at the time of the request.
Static sites enable you to decouple your content repository and front-end interface, giving you greater flexibility in how your content is served. Cost-efficiency is another reason companies migrate to a static site because static files are lightweight and often faster and cheaper to serve.
In the last few years, static sites have greatly increased in popularity. This surge is primarily due to advances in developer tools (languages and libraries) and a stronger desire among businesses to optimize website performance beyond the limits of a database-driven site. Below, we’ll discuss the benefits of a static site in greater detail.
Static sites can be written almost exclusively in HTML and serve a fixed set of data that renders the same for every site visitor. Static sites use server-side rendering to serve pre-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to a web browser. Dynamic sites operate in a completely different way, by leveraging HTML and CSS as well as server-side scripting languages like PHP to build webpages on the fly and serve different content to each site visitor.
A static HTML page does not require an external resource, like a database, which allows the page to work anywhere. For example, the page can be viewed offline and cached across multiple servers around the world using a CDN.
Static sites can be rendered using a multitude of frameworks. Developers can work using their preferred language and framework (such as JavaScript, Ruby, React, Vue, etc.), making the build and maintenance easier to perform. Other advantages include being able to better leverage your cloud infrastructure and simplify site development thanks to fewer dependencies.
A static site lets you present content across multiple channels without having to reauthor your content. What’s more, a static structure can easily adapt to the changing needs of your website or app.
With a dynamic site, hackers have multiple opportunities to breach your data because the entire system is connected. Yet with a static site, your content database exists independently from your front-end web interface. This setup gives hackers fewer entry points and keeps your data more secure. Website visitors do not connect to the content database each time they visit your website, which provides yet another security advantage compared to database-driven sites.
A static HTML page does not require an external resource, like a database, which allows the page to work anywhere. For example, the page can be viewed offline and cached across multiple servers around the world using a CDN.
A static site generator lets you apply a template to your data and content, which simplifies the process of converting your data into a website or application format. There are dozens of versions available for use with different developer languages and frameworks. Consider factors like site size, primary purpose, and functionality when evaluating static site generators.