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Development

Static Site Generation

SSG

Portrait of Robert Klimant, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Robert KlimantCo-founder

What is Static Site Generation?

Static site generation, often shortened to SSG, is an approach where every page of a website is built once at deploy time and stored as a finished HTML file. Static site generation produces a set of plain files that sit on a CDN and get served directly to visitors. No database query happens at request time, no server has to render anything live.

Why it matters

A static site is the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable kind of website you can run. Pages load in milliseconds because they are already built. Hosting costs collapse because you are serving files, not running servers. The site stays up even when the CMS goes down, because the CMS is only touched at build time. For most marketing sites, glossaries, blogs, and documentation, SSG is the right answer. The trade-off is that publishing new content requires a rebuild — usually a few seconds to a few minutes — instead of being instant. For pages that change once a day, that is a fine trade.

How it works

At deploy time, the framework pulls all the content from the CMS, runs through every page, and renders each one to a finished HTML file. Those files get pushed to a CDN like Cloudflare or Vercel, which has servers all over the world. When a visitor hits the site, the nearest server returns the matching file — no rendering, no database call, no application logic. When a marketer publishes a new article in the CMS, a webhook triggers a rebuild that takes anywhere from ten seconds to a few minutes, depending on site size. The new pages go live the moment the build finishes. Astro and Next.js both support SSG as their default mode.

Related terms

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    When a website builds the page on the server before sending it to the visitor's browser. The visitor sees finished content immediately, and Google sees the…

  • Incremental Static Regeneration

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    A way of keeping a static site fresh without rebuilding the whole thing every time. New or edited pages get regenerated on the fly, so marketing can publish…

  • Next.js

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  • Astro

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    A web framework built for content-heavy sites that need to load instantly. It ships almost no JavaScript by default, which is why marketing sites built in…

  • Content Delivery Network

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    A global network of servers that stores copies of your site close to visitors, so pages load fast in São Paulo, Sydney, and Stockholm without every request…

  • Static vs Dynamic Website

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    Static sites are pre-built pages served as files — fast and cheap. Dynamic sites generate pages on demand from a database — more flexible but more complex.…

  • Page Speed

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    How quickly a web page loads and becomes usable for a visitor — measured in seconds and milliseconds, and treated by Google as a confirmed ranking signal…