Static Site Generation (SSG)

Static Site Generation (SSG) changes the timing of how a page is built. Instead of a server assembling the HTML fresh on every visit, the whole site is compiled to static files once, at build time, and those files are served directly from a CDN.

The benefits are substantial: pages load almost instantly, there is no live database or application server to attack or to fall over under traffic, and hosting is cheap and effortless to scale. It is an excellent fit for marketing sites, blogs, documentation, and most content-driven business sites.

The trade-off is the build step and the handling of genuinely dynamic content. Features like search, comments, or personalised areas are added through APIs and small islands of JavaScript rather than rendered by the page itself. Frameworks like Astro make this hybrid approach straightforward, which is why SSG underpins most of the sites we build.