Static Site Generation
Rendering every page to a file at build time, so serving is just handing over bytes.
Static site generation produces the complete HTML for every page ahead of time, at build. Serving becomes a file lookup: no application server, no database at request time, nothing to scale under load, and a very small attack surface.
The trade is freshness and combinatorics. Content that changes requires a rebuild, and anything genuinely per-request — personalization, authenticated views — cannot be baked in. Sites with very large page counts pay build time proportional to that count.
Static generation pairs naturally with a build-time data layer: content in files, read and parsed during the build, with derived values (reading time, table of contents, structured metadata) computed once rather than per request. See Markdown and Frontmatter.
A pure static export also disables framework features that assume a server — image optimization on demand, request-time redirects, server-side handlers — so choosing it is a real constraint, not just a deployment flag. Where the constraint is uncomfortable, Incremental Static Regeneration is the usual middle ground.
For a page whose content is genuinely fixed, static generation dominates on every axis that matters: latency, cost, reliability, and the ability to keep working when everything else is down.
See also12
Server-Side Rendering
Producing a page's HTML on the server so the first response is already content.
Web Platform23 connections
Islands Architecture
Rendering a page as static HTML with small independently interactive regions.
Web Platform18 connections
Performance Budget
A committed numeric ceiling on a page's cost, enforced automatically.
Web Platform26 connections
Cache Invalidation
Deciding when a cached value has stopped being correct — famously one of the hard problems.
Web Platform30 connections
RSS
A syndication format letting readers subscribe to a site without an intermediary.
Data & Content13 connections
React Server Components
Components that execute only on the server and never ship their code to the browser.
Web Platform21 connections
Search Engine Optimization
Making content discoverable through search, most of which is ordinary quality work.
Data & Content29 connections
WordPress
The open-source PHP publishing system forked from b2 in 2003 that grew from a blogging tool into the software behind a large share of all websites, held together by themes, plugins, and a strict commitment to backward compatibility.
Web Platform12 connections
Slug
The short, readable, hyphenated part of a URL that names a page, borrowed from newsroom jargon, simple to generate and surprisingly hard to keep stable once other people link to it.
Data & Content13 connections
Sitemap
A list of a website's pages, either drawn for people as a map of its structure or published as an XML file that tells search engines what exists and when it last changed.
Data & Content10 connections
Web Hosting
Renting space on someone else's servers to put a website online, a business that moved from free personal pages and crowded shared machines to virtual servers, rented cloud infrastructure and services that host static files at the edge of the network.
Web Platform9 connections
Blog
A website of dated posts shown newest first, named in 1997 and made easy by tools like Blogger and WordPress, which turned personal publishing into a mass habit before social networks absorbed much of it.
Web Platform9 connections
Linked from17
- BlogWeb Platform
A website of dated posts shown newest first, named in 1997 and made easy by tools like Blogger and WordPress, which turned personal publishing into a mass habit before social networks absorbed much of it.
- Cache InvalidationWeb Platform
Deciding when a cached value has stopped being correct — famously one of the hard problems.
- FrontmatterData & Content
A metadata block at the top of a text document, separated from the body by delimiters.
- Incremental Static RegenerationWeb Platform
Serving a cached static page while regenerating it in the background after a chosen interval.
- Islands ArchitectureWeb Platform
Rendering a page as static HTML with small independently interactive regions.
- MarkdownData & Content
A plain-text formatting syntax designed to be readable as written, now the default for technical writing.
- Open GraphWeb Platform
The meta tags a page uses to describe its own preview card when a link is shared, how chat apps and social networks fetch them, and why a preview shows only what the page claims about itself.
- Progressive EnhancementWeb Platform
Building so the core experience works without scripts, with richer behavior layered on top.
- RSSData & Content
A syndication format letting readers subscribe to a site without an intermediary.
- Search Engine OptimizationData & Content
Making content discoverable through search, most of which is ordinary quality work.
- Server-Side RenderingWeb Platform
Producing a page's HTML on the server so the first response is already content.
- SitemapData & Content
A list of a website's pages, either drawn for people as a map of its structure or published as an XML file that tells search engines what exists and when it last changed.
- SlugData & Content
The short, readable, hyphenated part of a URL that names a page, borrowed from newsroom jargon, simple to generate and surprisingly hard to keep stable once other people link to it.
- Structured DataData & Content
Machine-readable markup describing what a page is about, in a shared vocabulary.
- Web CrawlerWeb Platform
A program that discovers the web by fetching pages and following their links, the machinery behind search engines and training datasets, and the voluntary etiquette that governs it.
- Web HostingWeb Platform
Renting space on someone else's servers to put a website online, a business that moved from free personal pages and crowded shared machines to virtual servers, rented cloud infrastructure and services that host static files at the edge of the network.
- WordPressWeb Platform
The open-source PHP publishing system forked from b2 in 2003 that grew from a blogging tool into the software behind a large share of all websites, held together by themes, plugins, and a strict commitment to backward compatibility.