About this website
Since web development has become more complicated, you have to deal with frameworks, CMS, deployment, and vulnerabilities. If you need a simple website it might be better remove such complexity with a static website.
What is a static website?
From Wikipedia,
a static web page is a web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application.
As you might already have understood, this website is a static website. It’s completely open-source and you can find the source code on GitHub.
I decided to make my own website as a static one principally to learn new skills that could now be applied to all my future work. And I discovered that fantastic world.
The thing that I like most in static website is flexibility. You have to code hard when building the website for the first time but after that, you could completely forget about it. Everything is already compiled and ready to be served. No more exploits, hacks, and scams to be aware of.
Give me some examples of what you think
Let’s think about a personal blog or a website for a company that doesn’t need to compute complex algorithms into it, but needs a website to advertise, to represent its trademark and to keep in touch with its customers. A static website is perfect, because it helps to - spoiler alert - cut off the costs.
Basically, static websites are strongly recommended to show a company work and to give to customers a place where they can find information and contacts about it. Obviously, static websites are not reccomended to complex sites like e-commerces, or web applications.
But let’s dive better into some advantage of static website.
What you like most in a static website?
It’s completely free!
Hosting a static website is completely free. Forever. You only need to spend some work when creating it (as any other things…) then it could be hosted online for free with many services.
Sometimes it happened to me to create new website (not static) for some company and I discovered they paid such expensive bills to host it on the internet.
To give an example 200€/year for a quite easy wordpress website could be completely reset forever with a static website.
Yes, a static website needs more initial work compared to a dynamic one but increased cost that a company needs to sustain when creating it will be paid in 2 years at most with a 0€/year hosting bill.
It focus only on important things
Let’s think again on a dynamic website for a company and suppose they are using Wordpress to build a great frontend and to manage some backend things.
The final website is certainly nice, but Wordpress is made to handle over 55.000 different things and normally we use only a very small part of it.
Creating from scratch a static website could help the developer to focus only on the core business of a company and the result of it is a cleaner design which offers an increased speed.
No worries for any kind of security patch or exploits
For definition, a static website is delivered exactly as stored so an attacker couldn’t do any sort of attack to it. A dynamic website must be secured versus Brute Force Attacks, File Inclusion Exploits, SQL Injections, Weak Passwords and so on.
Don’t misunderstand me, a well developed dynamic website is secure enough but once the design of it is complete, it requires attention by the webmaster to be kept secure.
In conclusion
I like my website and what exposed above is only a small part of what I like most in static websites.
In addition, to create this website I’m currently using Jekyll which is a powerful static website compiler and allows me to write my posts in Markdown. And I really like Markdown syntax.
My advice to all developers is to give a try to Jekyll, it’s easy to begin and it gives satisfactions.
To anyone who need a website I suggest to think seriously about three important questions:
- What’s the purpose of my website?
- How much do I have in my hosting budget?
- How much time am I willing to invest in learning how to use my system?
Starting with a series of questions like the above will help you narrow down a website solution that works best for you and other involved parties.
Thanks for your attention!
