Why Your Website Should Be Static

What is a static website?

Websites come in many forms and are creating using a variety of tools. They mainly fall under two categories, dynamic or static. So what is a static website? To understand what a static website is we need to take a brief look at the progression of websites over time.

In the earlier years, websites consisted of a collection of files sitting on a server somewhere in the world. When you visited a website, the browser simply made a request to the server to grab these files and display the content as the files created by designers or developers instructed.

As the demand increased for more features to support advanced use cases such as content management systems to aid running a blog or real estate website to name a few. This created what we now know as dynamic websites.

This shift to dynamic websites created more work to be done by the server before it can respond to the requests of the browser as it now had to determine what content to show when you visit a website. This is what a lot of websites of today look like.

Why should your website be static?

Not only has the technology developed and grown alongside this but so has the number of active internet users. As a result, there is a wider potential reach for your website and as your traffic grows, the more pressure it places on the server hosting your website.

The attempted solution to this problem has been to utilize larger and more servers even geographically distributed, that could share the load but as you would imagine this begins to get expensive. This also puts you in a situation where you are typically reactive to this traffic growth rather than proactive.

This has led us to a new way to build websites which isn't technically new but the process to achieve it is. I didn't tell you earlier but the older form I described at the beginning of this article is what is known as a static website.

What we have now is a modern method of building static websites. The difference is that the heavy work that servers would do is done ahead of time when the websites are deployed to the server. This way the server has less work to do in order to respond to requests.

Here are a few of the many benefits this process provides:

• Websites load faster (Much Faster)
• Cheaper hosting (Free most of the time)
• Improved security (CMS is separated from the website)

As with anything in life, there are some tradeoffs to be aware of but they definitely do not outweigh the benefits. The main one to be aware of is that there is now a build process required to publish new content to the website.

Does this sound interesting to you?

If you are interested in converting your website to a static website, you can reach out to us and let us know. If you don't already have a website, even better we can build one for you from scratch and prepare you to receive traffic from anywhere in the world.