SSG

What it is

Two ways to produce a page. A dynamic site assembles it when the request arrives: PHP wakes up, queries a database, fills a template, returns the result. A static site did all of that once, at build time, and left an HTML file on disk. The visitor gets the file.

That is the whole idea. Everything else — Astro, Hugo, Eleventy, Next in export mode — is a different way of running the same build.

Why it matters if you are paying for a website

Three consequences, in the order they show up on an invoice.

Speed you do not have to maintain. There is no origin work to be slow. The first byte arrives from a CDN edge, and the performance work that remains is about images and fonts, not about caching plugins.

A much smaller attack surface. There is no database to inject into and no admin panel on a public URL. Most of what I clean up on hacked WordPress sites arrives through an outdated plugin — a route that does not exist when the server only hands out files.

Hosting that rounds to nothing. This site runs on a free Cloudflare Pages tier and would continue to do so under traffic that would need a real server behind WordPress.

What it costs, honestly

A rebuild per change. Publish a correction and the site regenerates — seconds for a small site, and for this one a few minutes, because the build also renders a social card per page in a headless browser and runs its own link, schema and mirror checks. That is a fine trade for a site with 100 pages and a poor one for a catalogue with 100,000, where you would prerender the templates and fetch the rest at the edge.

The second cost is that anything genuinely dynamic — a cart, a logged-in view, a live inventory count — has to come from somewhere else: an API call from the browser, or a route you deliberately leave rendering on demand. That is a normal architecture, not a defeat, but it is a decision you make rather than one the CMS makes for you.

What SSG does not mean

It does not mean the site cannot be edited by a non-developer. Editing happens in a CMS or in the repository; the build is what turns either into files. Plenty of static sites keep WordPress as the editor and use it only as an API.

It also does not mean “no JavaScript”. Static describes when the HTML is produced, not what runs afterwards. A static page can carry as much client-side code as you like — which is precisely how a static site ends up slow anyway.