SSG (Static Site Generation)

What is static site generation?

Static site generation builds every page into finished HTML at build time, before anyone visits. When a request comes in, the server hands over a pre-built file. There is no rendering on demand, no database query in the request path, nothing to compute. The page just ships, usually straight from a CDN at the network edge.

This makes SSG the fastest and cheapest way to serve content that does not change per request. It differs from server-side rendering, which builds each page fresh on every visit, and from client rendering, which assembles the page in the browser. The trade-off is freshness. If content changes, the site has to rebuild, though modern tools soften this with incremental builds and on-demand revalidation that rebuild only the pages that changed. A documentation site or a marketing blog with thousands of articles is the ideal case: generate it all once, serve it from the edge, rebuild only when a page is edited.

Tools like Next.js, Astro, Hugo, and Eleventy generate static sites, often pulling content from a headless CMS at build time so editors still get a friendly interface.

SSG at Dallonses

We default to static generation whenever content can be pre-built, because nothing beats a pre-rendered file on a CDN for speed, cost, and resilience. There is no server to fall over under traffic and no database query slowing the first paint. For content-heavy sites, that decision alone often solves the performance complaint a client arrived with. It is a foundational tool in our web development work.

The hard part is keeping a static site current without rebuilding the world on every edit. We wire up incremental and on-demand revalidation so a content change republishes only the affected pages in seconds. Then our performance and SEO QA verifies the generated output actually ranks and loads the way it should, on real devices and real connections, not just in a build log.

Have a content-heavy site that needs to be fast and findable? Static generation might be the answer.

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