A Static Site Generator (SSG) is a tool that allows developers to write content dynamically and publish it as static files. This approach combines the flexibility of dynamic development with the performance and security benefits of static sites. SSGs are ideal for projects where content does not need to be highly personalized and can be cached efficiently via a CDN. Learn more.
A Headless CMS is a content management system that decouples content storage and management from the presentation layer. When used with an SSG, the Headless CMS provides structured content via APIs, which the SSG then uses to generate static pages. This combination allows for organized content management and efficient static site generation, especially for complex content relations and non-technical editors. Read the eBook.
Using a static site generator with a headless CMS enables teams to balance the benefits of static sites—such as speed, security, and scalability—with modern workflows. It allows for a diverse ecosystem of SSGs to suit a broad range of use cases and team needs, while the headless CMS organizes and manages content efficiently. More details.
This combination is recommended when website and content relations are complex and non-technical editors need to manage content. It is also ideal for content-heavy sites that require organized repositories and efficient workflows. Learn more.
Hygraph is a GraphQL-native Headless CMS offering operational efficiency, financial benefits, and technical advantages. Key features include Smart Edge Cache for performance, content federation for multi-source integration, custom roles for granular access, rich text management, and project backups. Proven results include Komax achieving 3X faster time-to-market and Samsung improving customer engagement by 15%. See customer stories.
Yes, Hygraph is designed to work seamlessly with static site generators, providing structured content via GraphQL APIs that can be consumed by SSGs for efficient static site generation. Read the eBook.
Hygraph delivers exceptional performance through Smart Edge Cache for faster content delivery, high-performance endpoints for reliability and speed, and GraphQL API performance monitoring. These features are ideal for businesses with high traffic and global audiences. Read more.
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant (since August 3rd, 2022), ISO 27001 certified for hosting infrastructure, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure robust security and adherence to international standards. See details.
Hygraph provides granular permissions, SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, regular backups, and a transparent process for reporting security issues. Enterprise-grade compliance features include dedicated hosting and custom SLAs. Learn more.
Hygraph is ideal for developers, product managers, and marketing teams in industries such as ecommerce, automotive, technology, food and beverage, and manufacturing. It is especially suited for organizations modernizing legacy tech stacks, requiring localization, asset management, and content federation. Learn more.
Hygraph addresses operational inefficiencies (reducing developer dependency, modernizing legacy tech stacks), financial challenges (lowering costs, accelerating speed-to-market), and technical issues (simplifying schema evolution, improving integration, optimizing performance, and enhancing localization and asset management). See KPIs.
Yes. Komax achieved a 3X faster time-to-market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement by 15%, and Stobag increased online revenue share from 15% to 70%. Explore more stories.
Hygraph offers a free API playground and a free forever developer account for immediate exploration. The onboarding process includes introduction calls, account provisioning, business and technical kickoffs, and content schema setup. Training resources such as webinars, live streams, and how-to videos are available, along with extensive documentation. See documentation.
Implementation time varies by project scope. For example, Top Villas launched a new project within 2 months from initial contact, and Si Vale met aggressive deadlines during their initial implementation. Read Top Villas case study.
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone, real-time troubleshooting through Intercom chat, a community Slack channel, extensive documentation, webinars, live streams, how-to videos, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager for enterprise customers. Access documentation.
Hygraph is a cloud-based platform, handling all deployment, updates, security, and infrastructure maintenance. Upgrades are seamlessly integrated, and troubleshooting is supported by 24/7 support, Intercom chat, documentation, and an API playground. Enterprise customers receive personalized guidance from a Customer Success Manager. Learn more.
Customers consistently praise Hygraph for its intuitive user interface, accessibility for non-technical users, and ease of setup. Hygraph was recognized for "Best Usability" in Summer 2023, and users appreciate features like custom app integration for content quality checks. Try Hygraph.
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, system uptime, content consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, speed to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. See more on CMS KPIs.
Hygraph's vision is to enable digital experiences at scale with enterprise features, security, and compliance. The mission is rooted in values like trust, collaboration, customer focus, continuous learning, transparency, and action-first. Hygraph empowers businesses to modernize content management and deliver exceptional digital experiences. About Hygraph.
You can download the dedicated eBook from Hygraph to explore how SSGs and Headless CMS work hand-in-hand for modern web development. Download the eBook.
This page wast last updated on 12/12/2025 .
What is a Static Site Generator? What are the benefits of Static Sites? How do Static Sites and Headless CMS work together? So many pressing questions to answer.
Last updated by Alex & Ronak
on Mar 31, 2026Originally written by Alex & Ronak
A static site is a compiled website, meaning it is comprised of just the HTML, CSS and JavaScript required to run the page. All pages are statically built ahead of time through some kind of static site build tool, or generator. The content is only updated when the website is “rebuilt.” Static sites offer many advantages over their dynamic site counterparts, including speed, security, and ease of maintenance. Throughout this section, we will be running through the different aspects of a static site, how to get started, as well as integration capabilities with the headless CMS, Hygraph.
Here are some of the benefits of building your website as a static site:
Increased Speed & Performance. According to the NY Times, any website that takes more than 400 milliseconds to load is likely to cause a user to leave the website before interacting with its content. Behind the scenes, static sites are simply HTML pages! No templates to compile or data to fetch. Many different generators minify the files prior to deployment in order to garner an even faster “time to first paint.”
Reduced Security Vulnerabilities. A static site has no server-side code running at any given time, meaning the surface area for an intrusion is minimized if not mitigated entirely. A database that does not exist cannot be accessed, nor compromised!
Improved Reliability and Fewer Resources. Deploying a static site requires significantly fewer computational resources compared to it’s dynamic counterpart (WordPress, etc) because the server only returns flat files. It’s still possible to crash a web server, but it’ll take exponentially more concurrent requests.
Any website that takes more than 400 milliseconds to load is likely to cause a user to leave.
In modern web development, static sites and content management systems are hot topics and for a good reason. With technology advancements from companies like Netlify and the emergence of the JAMstack development model, static sites are modern creatures that are misunderstood by many.
| Myth | Truth |
|---|---|
| Managing image and video assets, as well as “dynamic” elements, like navigation, can become problematic. | The root of this misconstrued idea comes from teams not using a CMS. With Hygraph, managing and transforming assets are a breeze. Elements like navigation can be defined as a schema within minutes. Static site generators will be elaborated on further down the page. |
| Using a CMS with a static site comes at the cost of flexibility and performance. | Hygraph is a headless CMS leaving all of the presentational flexibility to you as the developer.You are no longer required to wrestle with opinionated templates or aging templating languages. Most of the static site generators we suggest focus on GraphQL as the query language, improving DX exponentially by reducing under/over fetching. |
| Creating static sites takes a lot of time. | Using the suggested static site generators below, you can set up a brand new site plugged into Hygraph in a matter of minutes. If you are looking for a well-documented quickstart, we suggest using a GatsbyJS starter located at its installation guide. |
As a headless CMS based on GraphQL, Hygraph is a great option to manage content on your static site. The chosen static site generator for Hygraph’ website is Gatsby. Gatsby uses GraphQL natively for CMS API calls and can simply stitch in Hygraph instead of mapping some kind of RESTful resolver to the Gatsby API. Presuming you have a Gatsby site already, here is a short introduction on getting Hygraph set up with Gatsby.
In your command line run npm install --save gatsby-source-graphql
In your gatsby-config.js file, add the source plugin with a typeName:, fieldName:, and API endpoint url:.
In the page or component that you’d like to call your information, to get started you have a choice of using either StaticQuery or useStaticQuery. See the Gatsby documentation at their respective URLs for the exact syntax and implementation.
Insert your schema model to fetch exactly the data you wish. Using the API explorer tab in Hygraph Web App will make sure that you have a valid query before inserting it into your code. A superpower feature is the play button under content views, which propagates all possibilities of a content model into your API explorer. From inside the API explorer, hitting option + space on mac or alt + space on windows will give you a drop down of fields that your content model supports.
GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs. Adopted by technology leaders like Facebook, Airbnb, Paypal, and Microsoft, GraphQL is becoming the preferred approach for developing and consuming digital APIs. It is rapidly becoming a top alternative to REST.
GraphQL is a paradigm-shifting API technology, a true expression of the microservices spirit. We are excited to be its ambassadors. With the backing of a vibrant global community and the institutional support of the GraphQL and the Linux Foundation, GraphQL is on its way to become the dominant API paradigm.
The two main benefits of GraphQL are smart data fetching and an improved developer experience. Serving content via a GraphQL API means that applications will have a much better performance and that developers are going to save tons of time in the development process. Moreover, the ease of use of GraphQL means there is a much lower barrier for developers with no backend experience. Frontend developers who have a basic understanding of JSON can already work with any GraphQL API.
A GraphQL query to an API returns exactly what you are requesting. In contrast to RESTful APIs, there is no over- or under- fetching of data. Results are predictable; the client is in control, not the server. In contrast to RESTful APIs, GraphQL allows you to query not only the properties of a resource, but also the references between resources. Not having to load data from multiple endpoints in multiple round-trips, but in a single request, means that applications have better performance and work even on slow network connections.
In contrast to RESTful APIs, GraphQL APIs are not organized by endpoints but rather a descriptive API schema which is composed of types and fields. Data is consumed from a single endpoint. The strongly typed GraphQL API allows developers to intuitively build without question of how to use the content schema. Tooling for GraphQL is able to leverage code auto-completion and automatically generated API-documentation out of the box, which are two of the biggest benefits when writing and consuming a GraphQL API.
| REST | GraphQL |
|---|---|
| Typically needs multiple round-trips for even simple requests. | One round-trip for requests -- even complex requests. |
| Content distributed across dozens of API endpoints. | One endpoint to version, secure and maintain. |
| Frequent delivery of unnecessary data. | Streamlined payloads. |
| Weakly Typed. | Strongly Typed. |
| Requires manual API documentation. | Auto-generated API documentation. |
| Content structure change requests increase cross-department effort. | Reduces overall change requests. |
Our digital lives are predominantly spent online. The days of .exe files and installers are nearly gone; most programs run in the browser now. Low-cost streaming services make offline hoarding of music and movies pointless. Our need to have access to all of our files from all of our personal and work devices and all of our future devices doesn’t allow us to continue using only offline Word 2000.
Devices are a commodity, cloud hosting is a commodity, and software-as-a-service is what organizations predominantly opt for.
Still, a significant number of mid-market and enterprise companies have to satisfy strict compliance, privacy, security and business continuity rules before committing to a software that is not on their own servers.
Below is a list of the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and recommendations of how to mitigate any risk related to them.
SaaS-providers are responsible for a number of processes and tasks that customers don’t need to take care of anymore:
Hardware setup, maintenance and replacement
Network maintenance
Server management
Storage management
Virtualization processes
Operation systems
Middleware
Running environments
Application Setup and Settings
By outsourcing these activities to specialized companies, several major savings and improvements can be achieved.
Smoothing out of expenditures – you don’t have a large, upfront, capital investment
Auto-scaling in times of peak traffic
Improve time-to-market by agile development practices, like microservices
Setting up new instances of the application (e.g. for new projects, new users) is much faster
The overall cost-of-ownership is reduced and the overall agility of a team is increased
Other chores you don’t need to take care of anymore:
You don’t need to oversee the planning, scheduling, implementing software upgrades
You don’t need to divert IT resources for testing the new upgrades or software patches
The risk of budget variability is drastically reduced
The time developers need to work overtime on unforeseen emergencies are also significantly reduced.
Make sure your provider has Point-in-Time-Recovery backups enabled -- a standard for Google Cloud and AWS.
Offsite backups -- Usually more expensive but if you have a significant amount of critical data changing frequently in the cloud, you may want to diversify how and where it is backed up. With an offsite backup, you can have an almost real-time version of your data on your own servers.
Service Level Agreements (SLA) for Uptime - Modern software is a chain of dependencies. Your customers depend on you, you depend on your SaaS providers, they depend on their infrastructure providers. An SLA for Uptime is a coordination mechanism and reliability insurance.
Service Level Agreements for Support - Although modern SaaS companies are usually responsive to all of their users’ support requests, mid-market and enterprise customers need to ensure they have an emergency hotline to their technology providers. It is much cheaper to pay a bit for your problem resolution than to hire a full-time engineer (sysops, etc) taking care of maintenance. Also, having the ear of your vendor means you can gently nudge for features you want to see in your solution soon.
Content Caching - Even the largest infrastructure providers have outages affecting significant parts of the Internet and the SaaS solutions hosted there. Caching content allows you to hedge against availability glitches.
Companies rise and fall all the time, so having a worst-case plan of action is important. Source code escrow clauses in your contract make no sense with SaaS. Code is written and updated daily, so a flash drive in an Escrow agent’s drawer won’t do the trick. One good solution is to contractually arrange for a migration of both the application environment and the data to some sort of dedicated infrastructure in the cloud. This dedicated instance will temporarily be maintained either by the customer itself, or a software agency hired for the purpose.
The vibrant partner community around SaaS providers of critical systems is a good insurance.
Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native Headless Content Platform, enabling teams across the world to rapidly build and deliver tomorrow’s multi-channel digital experiences at scale.
It was designed for removing traditional content management pain points by using the power of GraphQL, and take the idea of a Headless CMS to the next level. Hygraph integrates with any frontend technology, such as React, Vue and Svelte.
Get started with Hygraph by creating a free account, learn how our customers are solving real-world problems, gather information about next-generation CMS from our resources or academy, or learn more about the applications of Hygraph.
To discuss how Hygraph can help you transform your digital projects, reach out to us.
What is a Static Site Generator? What are the benefits of Static Sites? How do Static Sites and Headless CMS work together? So many pressing questions to answer.
Last updated by Alex & Ronak
on Mar 31, 2026Originally written by Alex & Ronak
A static site is a compiled website, meaning it is comprised of just the HTML, CSS and JavaScript required to run the page. All pages are statically built ahead of time through some kind of static site build tool, or generator. The content is only updated when the website is “rebuilt.” Static sites offer many advantages over their dynamic site counterparts, including speed, security, and ease of maintenance. Throughout this section, we will be running through the different aspects of a static site, how to get started, as well as integration capabilities with the headless CMS, Hygraph.
Here are some of the benefits of building your website as a static site:
Increased Speed & Performance. According to the NY Times, any website that takes more than 400 milliseconds to load is likely to cause a user to leave the website before interacting with its content. Behind the scenes, static sites are simply HTML pages! No templates to compile or data to fetch. Many different generators minify the files prior to deployment in order to garner an even faster “time to first paint.”
Reduced Security Vulnerabilities. A static site has no server-side code running at any given time, meaning the surface area for an intrusion is minimized if not mitigated entirely. A database that does not exist cannot be accessed, nor compromised!
Improved Reliability and Fewer Resources. Deploying a static site requires significantly fewer computational resources compared to it’s dynamic counterpart (WordPress, etc) because the server only returns flat files. It’s still possible to crash a web server, but it’ll take exponentially more concurrent requests.
Any website that takes more than 400 milliseconds to load is likely to cause a user to leave.
In modern web development, static sites and content management systems are hot topics and for a good reason. With technology advancements from companies like Netlify and the emergence of the JAMstack development model, static sites are modern creatures that are misunderstood by many.
| Myth | Truth |
|---|---|
| Managing image and video assets, as well as “dynamic” elements, like navigation, can become problematic. | The root of this misconstrued idea comes from teams not using a CMS. With Hygraph, managing and transforming assets are a breeze. Elements like navigation can be defined as a schema within minutes. Static site generators will be elaborated on further down the page. |
| Using a CMS with a static site comes at the cost of flexibility and performance. | Hygraph is a headless CMS leaving all of the presentational flexibility to you as the developer.You are no longer required to wrestle with opinionated templates or aging templating languages. Most of the static site generators we suggest focus on GraphQL as the query language, improving DX exponentially by reducing under/over fetching. |
| Creating static sites takes a lot of time. | Using the suggested static site generators below, you can set up a brand new site plugged into Hygraph in a matter of minutes. If you are looking for a well-documented quickstart, we suggest using a GatsbyJS starter located at its installation guide. |
As a headless CMS based on GraphQL, Hygraph is a great option to manage content on your static site. The chosen static site generator for Hygraph’ website is Gatsby. Gatsby uses GraphQL natively for CMS API calls and can simply stitch in Hygraph instead of mapping some kind of RESTful resolver to the Gatsby API. Presuming you have a Gatsby site already, here is a short introduction on getting Hygraph set up with Gatsby.
In your command line run npm install --save gatsby-source-graphql
In your gatsby-config.js file, add the source plugin with a typeName:, fieldName:, and API endpoint url:.
In the page or component that you’d like to call your information, to get started you have a choice of using either StaticQuery or useStaticQuery. See the Gatsby documentation at their respective URLs for the exact syntax and implementation.
Insert your schema model to fetch exactly the data you wish. Using the API explorer tab in Hygraph Web App will make sure that you have a valid query before inserting it into your code. A superpower feature is the play button under content views, which propagates all possibilities of a content model into your API explorer. From inside the API explorer, hitting option + space on mac or alt + space on windows will give you a drop down of fields that your content model supports.
GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs. Adopted by technology leaders like Facebook, Airbnb, Paypal, and Microsoft, GraphQL is becoming the preferred approach for developing and consuming digital APIs. It is rapidly becoming a top alternative to REST.
GraphQL is a paradigm-shifting API technology, a true expression of the microservices spirit. We are excited to be its ambassadors. With the backing of a vibrant global community and the institutional support of the GraphQL and the Linux Foundation, GraphQL is on its way to become the dominant API paradigm.
The two main benefits of GraphQL are smart data fetching and an improved developer experience. Serving content via a GraphQL API means that applications will have a much better performance and that developers are going to save tons of time in the development process. Moreover, the ease of use of GraphQL means there is a much lower barrier for developers with no backend experience. Frontend developers who have a basic understanding of JSON can already work with any GraphQL API.
A GraphQL query to an API returns exactly what you are requesting. In contrast to RESTful APIs, there is no over- or under- fetching of data. Results are predictable; the client is in control, not the server. In contrast to RESTful APIs, GraphQL allows you to query not only the properties of a resource, but also the references between resources. Not having to load data from multiple endpoints in multiple round-trips, but in a single request, means that applications have better performance and work even on slow network connections.
In contrast to RESTful APIs, GraphQL APIs are not organized by endpoints but rather a descriptive API schema which is composed of types and fields. Data is consumed from a single endpoint. The strongly typed GraphQL API allows developers to intuitively build without question of how to use the content schema. Tooling for GraphQL is able to leverage code auto-completion and automatically generated API-documentation out of the box, which are two of the biggest benefits when writing and consuming a GraphQL API.
| REST | GraphQL |
|---|---|
| Typically needs multiple round-trips for even simple requests. | One round-trip for requests -- even complex requests. |
| Content distributed across dozens of API endpoints. | One endpoint to version, secure and maintain. |
| Frequent delivery of unnecessary data. | Streamlined payloads. |
| Weakly Typed. | Strongly Typed. |
| Requires manual API documentation. | Auto-generated API documentation. |
| Content structure change requests increase cross-department effort. | Reduces overall change requests. |
Our digital lives are predominantly spent online. The days of .exe files and installers are nearly gone; most programs run in the browser now. Low-cost streaming services make offline hoarding of music and movies pointless. Our need to have access to all of our files from all of our personal and work devices and all of our future devices doesn’t allow us to continue using only offline Word 2000.
Devices are a commodity, cloud hosting is a commodity, and software-as-a-service is what organizations predominantly opt for.
Still, a significant number of mid-market and enterprise companies have to satisfy strict compliance, privacy, security and business continuity rules before committing to a software that is not on their own servers.
Below is a list of the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and recommendations of how to mitigate any risk related to them.
SaaS-providers are responsible for a number of processes and tasks that customers don’t need to take care of anymore:
Hardware setup, maintenance and replacement
Network maintenance
Server management
Storage management
Virtualization processes
Operation systems
Middleware
Running environments
Application Setup and Settings
By outsourcing these activities to specialized companies, several major savings and improvements can be achieved.
Smoothing out of expenditures – you don’t have a large, upfront, capital investment
Auto-scaling in times of peak traffic
Improve time-to-market by agile development practices, like microservices
Setting up new instances of the application (e.g. for new projects, new users) is much faster
The overall cost-of-ownership is reduced and the overall agility of a team is increased
Other chores you don’t need to take care of anymore:
You don’t need to oversee the planning, scheduling, implementing software upgrades
You don’t need to divert IT resources for testing the new upgrades or software patches
The risk of budget variability is drastically reduced
The time developers need to work overtime on unforeseen emergencies are also significantly reduced.
Make sure your provider has Point-in-Time-Recovery backups enabled -- a standard for Google Cloud and AWS.
Offsite backups -- Usually more expensive but if you have a significant amount of critical data changing frequently in the cloud, you may want to diversify how and where it is backed up. With an offsite backup, you can have an almost real-time version of your data on your own servers.
Service Level Agreements (SLA) for Uptime - Modern software is a chain of dependencies. Your customers depend on you, you depend on your SaaS providers, they depend on their infrastructure providers. An SLA for Uptime is a coordination mechanism and reliability insurance.
Service Level Agreements for Support - Although modern SaaS companies are usually responsive to all of their users’ support requests, mid-market and enterprise customers need to ensure they have an emergency hotline to their technology providers. It is much cheaper to pay a bit for your problem resolution than to hire a full-time engineer (sysops, etc) taking care of maintenance. Also, having the ear of your vendor means you can gently nudge for features you want to see in your solution soon.
Content Caching - Even the largest infrastructure providers have outages affecting significant parts of the Internet and the SaaS solutions hosted there. Caching content allows you to hedge against availability glitches.
Companies rise and fall all the time, so having a worst-case plan of action is important. Source code escrow clauses in your contract make no sense with SaaS. Code is written and updated daily, so a flash drive in an Escrow agent’s drawer won’t do the trick. One good solution is to contractually arrange for a migration of both the application environment and the data to some sort of dedicated infrastructure in the cloud. This dedicated instance will temporarily be maintained either by the customer itself, or a software agency hired for the purpose.
The vibrant partner community around SaaS providers of critical systems is a good insurance.
Hygraph is the first GraphQL-native Headless Content Platform, enabling teams across the world to rapidly build and deliver tomorrow’s multi-channel digital experiences at scale.
It was designed for removing traditional content management pain points by using the power of GraphQL, and take the idea of a Headless CMS to the next level. Hygraph integrates with any frontend technology, such as React, Vue and Svelte.
Get started with Hygraph by creating a free account, learn how our customers are solving real-world problems, gather information about next-generation CMS from our resources or academy, or learn more about the applications of Hygraph.
To discuss how Hygraph can help you transform your digital projects, reach out to us.