What a Static Site Is, and When You Need Something Else
Most websites are pages people read. Those can be built once and sent as files, and that covers more sites than you might expect.
A static site is a website made of finished files. Every page is built once, ahead of time, and saved as HTML. When someone visits, the server finds the file and sends it. Nothing is put together on the spot.
WordPress works the other way. Each visit starts a small program: PHP asks a database for the page’s content, pours it into a theme and sends the result. The page you see was assembled a moment before you saw it. Caching plugins keep copies to skip some of that work, which helps, but the machinery still sits behind every page.
This week’s posts are for anyone thinking of leaving WordPress: what static hosting does well, how our own tools cover the gaps, and where it isn’t the answer.
Where the files come from
Nobody writes the HTML by hand. A site generator such as Hugo or Jekyll takes your text, written in Markdown, and your templates, and produces the files. An AI coding tool can write the templates and pages for you. The source lives in a Git repository on GitHub or GitLab. You push a change, we build the site in a sealed container, and the new files go live.
If you would rather design by dragging blocks around, Mobirise is a free website builder for Windows, Mac and Linux. It saves the finished site as HTML files in a folder on your computer. Upload that folder to us, or a zip of it, or push it to GitHub or GitLab, and we publish the files as they are.
Editing doesn’t mean learning Git. A Git-based content editor gives whoever runs the site a page in the browser for writing and changing posts, the job the WordPress dashboard does now. Saving a post commits it to the repository, and that starts a build. Sveltia CMS and Decap CMS are free and work with GitHub or GitLab, and Pages CMS is free for sites on GitHub. If your Hugo site uses Sveltia, our free extension turns a table pasted from Word or Excel into an accessible one.
What a static site handles well
Any site whose pages are the same for every visitor: a business site, a blog, a charity’s pages, documentation, a portfolio, an event. That is most of the web.
The usual objection is that a real site needs more than pages. It needs a contact form, a way to take bookings, a mailing list and some idea of who visits. None of those needs your site to run code. They need a service that does, and we run them for every site we host: forms, a booking widget, a newsletter and analytics.
A shop can work the same way. Snipcart adds a basket and checkout to the pages you already have, and each buy button is an ordinary HTML button carrying the product’s name and price. Shopify’s Buy Button puts products from a Shopify store on any site. Stripe Payment Links need no code at all: you paste a link or a button into the page. The service takes the payment and keeps the order.
When you need something else
A static site shows every visitor the same page. That rules it out for jobs like these:
- A members’ area, where each person signs in and sees their own content.
- A forum or anything else where visitors publish for other visitors to read.
Plenty of sites mix the two. The members’ area or the forum runs on software built for it, and the rest of the site, the part people read, is static. Each links to the other.
If your site is mostly pages people read, it can be static, and the rest of this week’s posts are about why that is worth doing.
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