Frequently Asked Questions

Static Websites & Modern Web Architecture

What is a static website?

A static website is built with pages of static content—plain HTML, JavaScript, or CSS code—that remains consistent for all users and offers little interactivity. Because the content is pre-rendered and not dependent on user-specific data, static sites deliver fast performance and lightweight overhead, making them ideal for simple use cases. Learn more.

How have static websites evolved over time?

Originally, websites were static HTML pages coded separately, which was time-intensive and lacked repeatable elements. The rise of dynamic websites introduced reusable components and improved workflows but added server-side overhead. Today, static sites benefit from modern tooling like Static Site Generators (SSGs) and the Jamstack, enabling fast performance and creative ways to add dynamic content. Read more.

What are the main differences between static and dynamic websites?

Static websites serve pre-rendered content that does not change based on user interactions, resulting in faster load times and simpler architecture. Dynamic websites generate content on the fly for each user request, allowing for personalized experiences but requiring more server resources and database queries. See comparison.

How do static websites work and what are the common methods to build them?

Static websites can be built using three main methods: (1) Simple static sites with HTML/CSS for straightforward content, (2) Static Site Generators (SSGs) for more complex use cases and reusable templates, and (3) SSGs combined with a headless CMS for complex content relationships and non-technical editors. Learn more.

What are the key components of a modern static website?

Modern static websites typically include a Static Site Generator (SSG), a content layer (such as markdown files or a headless CMS), and a hosting platform. SSGs create static HTML pages from templates and data, while a headless CMS helps organize and manage structured content, enabling distributed workflows for content editors. Explore details.

What are the advantages of static websites?

Static websites offer several advantages:

Read more.

What are the disadvantages of static websites?

Disadvantages include the need for development expertise to build and maintain static sites, and additional effort required to add dynamic content or interactivity. Teams may need to integrate extra services or mutate content in a headless CMS to support features like user-generated content or forms. See details.

How do Static Site Generators (SSGs) compare to dynamic websites?

SSGs allow teams to benefit from static site performance while enabling modern developer workflows with reusable components. Unlike dynamic sites, which require database queries for every user request, SSGs serve pre-rendered static files, reducing server load and improving speed. Learn more.

How can I build a static website?

To build a static website, you should:

  1. Choose a frontend framework (e.g., React, Vue.js, AngularJS).
  2. Select a headless CMS for content management, especially for content-heavy sites.
  3. Pick a hosting platform (e.g., Vercel, Netlify).
Integrating additional services can help balance performance with interactive experiences. See guide.

Hygraph Features & Capabilities

What is Hygraph and how does it support static websites?

Hygraph is a headless CMS that enables teams to manage structured content for static websites. It integrates seamlessly with Static Site Generators, allowing both technical and non-technical users to organize, update, and federate content efficiently. Hygraph's GraphQL-native architecture supports modern workflows and scalability. Learn more.

What are the key features of Hygraph?

Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a user-friendly interface. It supports integrations with popular hosting, eCommerce, localization, digital asset management, personalization, and AI tools. Key features include SSO, audit logs, encryption, and sandbox environments for security and compliance. See full feature list.

What integrations does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph integrates with Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. See all integrations.

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. API Reference.

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph emphasizes rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized delivery reduces bounce rates and increases conversions. See performance details.

Pricing & Plans

What is Hygraph's pricing model?

Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. See pricing details.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant, ensuring enterprise-grade security and regulatory compliance. See security features.

What security features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. Learn more.

Use Cases & Customer Success

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It serves modern software companies, enterprises seeking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale, improve development velocity, or re-platform from legacy solutions. See case studies.

What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?

Industries include Food and Beverage, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality, Media and Publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, Marketplace, Education Technology, and Wellness and Fitness. Explore case studies.

Can you share specific customer success stories using Hygraph?

Yes. Komax achieved 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. See more success stories.

How long does it take to implement Hygraph and how easy is it to start?

Hygraph is designed for quick onboarding—even non-technical users can get started easily. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. Users can sign up for a free account and access documentation and onboarding guides. See documentation.

What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?

Customers praise Hygraph for its intuitive interface and ease of use, noting that even non-technical users can start using it right away. The UI is described as logical and user-friendly for both technical and non-technical teams. See feedback.

Support & Implementation

What support and training does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and a community Slack channel. Contact support.

Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?

Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything needed to build and deploy projects.

Business Impact & Pain Points

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph reduces reliance on developers for content updates, modernizes legacy tech stacks, addresses conflicting needs of global teams, and improves user experience for content creation. Financially, it lowers operational costs, speeds up time-to-market, and supports scalability. Technically, it simplifies development workflows, streamlines query management, and resolves cache and integration challenges. See product details.

What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with Hygraph?

KPIs include time saved on content updates, number of updates without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. See KPI details.

Competition & Differentiation

How does Hygraph differentiate itself from other CMS platforms?

Hygraph stands out with its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and user-friendly interface. It empowers non-technical users, modernizes legacy systems, streamlines workflows, and supports global teams with consistent branding. These strengths address operational, financial, and technical pain points more effectively than traditional CMS platforms. See differentiation.

Getting Started & Resources

How can I get started with Hygraph?

You can sign up for a free-forever account at Hygraph. Resources like documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides are available to help you navigate the platform. See resources.

Customer Proof

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph is trusted by leading brands such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. See customer stories.

Webinar Event: How to Avoid Personalization Tech Traps

What is a Static Website

What static websites are, the differences between static sites and dynamic sites, and how to build a modern static website.
Jing Li

Last updated by Jing 

Aug 09, 2024

Originally written by Emily

Mobile image

Choosing the right web architecture is one of the most common dilemmas when building a website. You might have heard of static and dynamic websites, but you are unsure how each approach will affect your website in the long run.

This article explains what exactly static and dynamic sites are, how they compare to each other, and how to employ modern tooling to reap the benefits of static sites with simplified workflows.

#What is a static website?

A static site is built with pages of static content or plain HTML, Javascript, or CSS code. This content stays consistent regardless of the user or where the user is and offers little interactivity. Because the content served is not dependent on a particular user, it can be pre-rendered, leading to fast performance and lightweight overhead in simple use cases.

#Static websites: how did they evolve?

Static was once the only way to build a website. Originally, websites were static HTML pages, which were coded separately and were time-intensive. For multi-page sites, each would have to be individual HTML files, lacking repeatable elements.

As users began to expect better performance, developers craved more intuitive workflows. With the advent of dynamic websites came the ability to share repeatable code across different pages. Things that should be consistent across the site could now be “components”, saving developers time and energy.

However, dynamic sites added more overhead on the server side, and querying content on the fly led to longer load times. These dilemmas led to the emergence of static sites, with more teams turning to static builds for simple sites due to their performance benefits.

Today, the tooling and community around static sites have grown significantly with the rise in popularity of the Jamstack. Static sites enable teams to get projects up and running quickly and find creative ways to add dynamic content to largely static sites.

#How do static websites work

Depending on your use case, you can build a static website using these 3 methods in the modern days:

  1. Simple static sites—Simple static sites are a good option for sites where the content does not change often or when the site is straightforward. If you want to build a simple presentation with a few pages, e.g., a web page for a local business or a personal blog, it's best to build it in HTML/CSS for simplicity.

  2. Use a static site generator (SSG )—A Static Site Generator (SSG) may supplement more complex use cases, especially useful when you have hardcoded content or content in the markdown files. You want to reuse a page or templates, and you have content maintained by technical people who can edit content directly in code or are comfortable doing it in markdown files.
  3. Static site generator + a headless CMS—This method is mainly employed where website and content relations are more complex and non-technical editors manage your content (they don't have to be purely non-technical, but they are uncomfortable pushing changes to the repo every time a content change is made).

It’s worth noting that although many folks criticize static websites’ limitations compared to dynamic websites, they are only looking at the simplest way of constructing a static website. Most of these can be remedied by using SSGs and a headless CMS.

#Components of a modern static website

Modern static sites gained more popularity with the rise of the Jamstack. The Jamstack promotes modular architectures to give teams the functionality they need without the rigid structure of monolith systems. As mentioned in the content above, modern static sites typically have the following components.

Static site generator

Static Site Generators create static HTML web pages based on data and templates from within the tool. When teams use a static site generator, they benefit from the website's static nature while still having tooling such as repeatable components and powerful APIs, which can create more modern workflows and experiences.

In tandem with a headless CMS, an SSG can help teams balance the benefits of static sites while using modern workflows. A diverse ecosystem of SSGs can suit a broad range of use cases and team needs.

The content and CMS

The content layer is how teams store and manage their content for their static site. Some teams use a collection of markdown files; however, this can become cumbersome as time goes on and more content is created.

Headless CMS can be a good way to organize and manage content while benefiting from a static site. It provides the capability to create an organized repository of structured content without the opinion of a front-end system. Headless CMS also creates a more distributed workflow, with content editors able to manipulate all of the content without the need to involve developers.

#Pros of static websites

We will break down some of the key advantages of static sites to fully explain how you can choose between a static site and a dynamic one.

Security

Static sites are more secure than dynamic sites because static sites are pre-built files that only communicate with the backend when there are changes to the content instead of at every request and do not send information to the server. The high volume of information sent to the server and the high volume of round trips are common vulnerabilities for tooling such as Wordpress.

Using a headless CMS can also provide an extra layer between databases with sensitive information and the SSG and allow users to federate data from existing external databases.

Performance

Static sites remove the time needed to fetch the content for the user on a case-by-case basis using pre-built static files. The pre-built files mean that it is easy to create high-performing static sites. In light of the page experience update with Google, to be competitive in terms of performance, the static website is the best option for teams wanting to maintain strong SEO.

Requires fewer machine resources

Because static sites are built once and only rebuilt when there are changes to the content and serve HTML and CSS, they do not require teams to constantly compile multiple files and roundtrips to the database to retrieve content. Users are served the prebuilt content, which saves machine resources and enables speedy performance.

#Cons of static websites

There are some slight disadvantages of working with static sites which make them not ideal for every team and use case.

Requires development knowledge/expertise

Building static sites requires teams to find developers with experience with tooling such as Static Site Generators or plan time for teams to adjust to the approaches into project timelines. Because of the popularity of these frameworks and systems, there is a large community of developers with experience with these technologies. However, it is still an important consideration when starting new projects.

Requires additional effort to add dynamic content

Dynamic content requires teams to add additional services or mutate content into your chosen headless CMS. While adding dynamic content with the Jamstack and static sites requires an extra step, it enables teams to implement best-of-breed services built for a specific use case. Popular types of dynamic content include user-generated content (UGC), such as a comment section or a place to submit forms.

#What is a dynamic website?

Dynamic websites are sites that serve content based on the user. Considerations such as language, location, and target group are taken into account, and content is served based on the information relevant to the user.

Dynamic Site Architecture.png

#Pros and cons of dynamic websites

Dynamic content requires content to be served based on the user. This means that for every user request, a round trip to the database is required to retrieve content, populate the page with the content, and serve it to the user.

While this means the user receives highly relevant information, there are often trade-offs, such as exceptional performance and security.

Static Site Generators have found a way to strike a balance between static and dynamic sites, offering the benefits of traditional static sites while offering more interaction.

#Static site generators (SSGs) vs. dynamic websites

Static Site Generators enable teams to benefit from the processing power of static sites while enabling teams to build modern, efficient developer workflows.

Instead of having to build every static page separately, SSGs promote the creation of reusable components that can be used across a particular project and serve page specific html, Javascript, and CSS where it is appropriate. There is a lot of tooling around SSGs that enable more personalization and dynamic experiences while the sites remain largely static.

Static Site Architecture.png

The key difference between dynamic sites and sites built with SSGs is that dynamic sites still require additional roundtrips for every user request. With SSGs, the website will serve pre-rendered static files.

#How to build a static website

Taking a closer look at how to build a static site gives teams considering this approach a better understanding of what to expect from this approach.

1. Choose a frontend framework

The first consideration is which frontend framework to use. Many static sites follow Jamstack methodology, meaning that the framework will be Javascript based. Some popular frontend frameworks for building with static sites include React, Vue.js, and AngularJS.

2. Choose a headless CMS

A headless CMS is a key element for managing content effectively, especially for content-heavy sites. Important considerations for selecting the best CMS for your team include how easy it is to federate content with a particular CMS and whether or not they offer functionality like localization out of the box.

3. Choose a hosting platform

Like the frontend framework, the hosting platform is largely based on team preference. Popular choices include Vercel and Netlify.

Static sites are a good option for many use cases in the modern web context. By integrating additional services, teams can strike a balance between the performance benefits of static sites and the interactive experiences enabled by dynamic content.

Blog Authors

Share with others

Sign up for our newsletter!

Be the first to know about releases and industry news and insights.