Fast load times with static site generators
Pages built in advance and served from a CDN load fast and give attackers little to aim at.
Background
A static site generator builds every page of a website in advance as plain HTML. The server then just hands out files. That cuts load times, server costs and security risks.
On a classic website, the server builds each page again for every visit. Static pages skip that step.
Benefits
Very short response times, as no database query is needed
Stable under traffic peaks, because a CDN distributes the files
A small attack surface, with no publicly accessible database
Good conditions for LCP and so for the Core Web Vitals
Little effort for server operation and updates
Hosting on simple infrastructure or directly on the CDN
Content stays in the CMS
Your editors keep working in the CMS. Statamic can export the whole site as static files. It can also feed content via API to generators such as Astro or SvelteKit. Each time you publish, the site is rebuilt and deployed automatically. On large sites, we rebuild only the pages that changed.
Limits and hybrid set-ups
Personalised content, log-in areas and shopping baskets cannot be purely static. Here we mix static pages with dynamic areas. Statamic's static cache is another option. Forms and search connect through lightweight services. The right mix depends on how much content you have, how often it changes and what the site must do. We decide it per project.
Search engines
Search engines get full HTML that does not rely on JavaScript. Meta data, structured data and sitemaps are created during the build. Response times stay the same even when many crawlers hit the site at once.