The joy of a static website

May 2026

In a recent post I mentioned that I migrated my website. That was less of a hassle than it seems. My blog is a static website you see, so migration involved no more action than downloading all files from the old hoster and uploading them to the new one. I also cleaned up the site a bit, but that is another story.

What is a static website, some of you may ask? Often, that is explained as a site using only HTML, css and javascript. That single phrase explains the implementation of a static site, but not what it essentially is. So let me try to give another perspective.

Many people use Wordpress, which is a Content Management System or CMS. There are various CMSes, but Wordpress is very popular. A CMS is a wonderful tool, serving web pages dynamically. What is meant by that? Let me explain.

Wordpress uses a database at your hoster to store about anything that is related to your site. For example, your posts and pictures are stored in that database in some form. When a request for a post comes from a visitor's browser, Wordpress starts searching that post in the database, formats it as needed, and sends the resulting web page back to the requester's browser.

Every time a page is requested from your Wordpress site, the machinery is fired up to compose that page anew, or retrieve it from a cache in case the system would be smart enough to establish whether the previously generated instance is still actual. In any case, you will understand that processing power is needed to serve web pages this way, and that it may take some time for a site to respond.

If your website does not need to keep dynamic inventory, like a webshop, the database contents for your site likely are essentially constant between writing posts. In that case, you could perform the one trick that speeds up any IT system - preprocessing as much as possible at forehand. When you write a new post, you would have your CMS generate all possible pages for your site and store all of them on the server, ready to be served immediately. After this preprocessing, required processing power to serve pages is minimal. To put it in other words, a static site serves your pages from stock, instead of on demand.

Pros of a static website are in the first place excellent performance but also the lack of a vulnerable online site administration tool. Also, since my static site needs neither server-side database nor scripts, an economical plan at my hoster suffices. There are of course cons to a static site. It is not compatible with modern functionality you may need like nifty visual effects, analytics, inventories or automatic processing of reactions to posts. Like so much else in life, you will have to make a balanced choice between your needs and your resources.

Published in category Tech Tips. More on Internet.