What is static site generation?

Instead of assembling a page on a server each time someone visits (server-side rendering), SSG does the work once, ahead of time, producing plain HTML files. Those files are then served instantly from a global CDN — there's no database query or server render on each request.

This makes static sites extremely fast, very secure (nothing to exploit at request time), and cheap to host and scale. The trade-off is that highly personalised or constantly-changing content needs extra techniques (incremental builds, on-demand rendering, or client-side data). For marketing sites, blogs and docs, SSG is close to ideal.

We default to static generation for content sites — it's why our builds load fast and score highly on Core Web Vitals — and reach for on-demand or server rendering only where the content genuinely needs it.

Common questions