Static Site Generation

Static Site Generation builds every page of the site into an HTML file at deploy time, then serves those files directly from a CDN. There’s no server-side rendering on each request, no database query, no compute — just bytes returning from the closest edge. SSG is why static sites consistently outperform dynamic ones on every Core Web Vital.

The trade-off is freshness. Static pages reflect the data at build time; if the underlying source changes, the page won’t update until the next build (or the next on-demand revalidation, in frameworks that support it). For studio sites, marketing sites, blogs, and documentation, that’s usually fine — content changes on the order of days, builds take minutes.

Next.js, Astro, and Eleventy all default to static generation where possible, falling back to SSR or client-side rendering only for routes that genuinely need it.