Web_Designer_UK__May_2018

10 BEST STATIC SITE GENERATORS
Most sites you visit on the web are
probably generated dynamically
– that is, rather than having all of
their content encoded into the HTML
stored on the server, they retrieve
content from a database and
construct pages to serve to you on
the fly. Many also provide user
interactivity through logins, forms and
so on. Think of Facebook for an
example of both of these things.
To build this type of functionality
yourself, you might look to a CMS
such as WordPress.
For some use cases, however, this is
overkill. Simple pages, such as a
personal profile, information about a
business, or even a blog really don’t
need this sort of overhead or
complexity. You could of course just
build static HTML yourself in a text
editor, and indeed, many years ago
this was how all sites were built, but
“ PERFORMANCE
WILL BE GREATLY
IMPROVED”
10
BEST
this rapidly becomes cumbersome to
maintain when you want to scale up
or make changes. Static site
generators offer a solution to this, by
enabling you to build static HTML
pages using templates.
Essentially, static site generators are
command-line tools which shift the
creation of the final HTML page
forward from the point the user
requests it to the point you write the
content. When you make an update,
you build the new page which can
then be served as-is to every user who
requests them. This offers several
advantages. Performance will be
greatly improved compared to a
dynamic site, since serving static
HTML and CSS has a very low
footprint. Your server-side setup will be
much simpler, which also means fewer
security worries. Conversely, however,
you’ll lose the opportunity to deliver
real-time content or receive user input.
Static site generators have exploded
in popularity in recent years, so
navigating the wide range of choice
can be difficult. Here, we’ve taken a
look at some of the best options you
should be considering.
1.
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