By René Mattis · vona
The Comeback of the Static Website
Jamstack, SSG, edge rendering — why static websites are in demand again and what that means for modern web projects.
It sounds paradoxical: at a time when web technology is more complex than ever, static websites are experiencing a real resurgence. Not the plain HTML pages of the 1990s — but a new generation of statically generated websites that combine the simplicity of the original web with modern development practices. The trend has a name — Jamstack — and it is fundamentally changing how many professional web projects are built.
The idea behind static websites is simple: HTML, CSS and JavaScript are generated once and then delivered unchanged. There is no database call on the request, no server-side runtime, no dynamic rendering per page view. The result is usually very short load times — because the browser receives a finished file from a CDN that it only has to display.
What Static Site Generators Can Do Today
Tools like Eleventy, Hugo, Astro or — for larger teams — Next.js with static export make it possible to generate even complex websites statically. Content comes from headless CMS systems like Contentful, Sanity or Strapi, is fetched at build time and rendered into static HTML pages. From the user’s point of view, the result behaves like a dynamic website, but technically it is static delivery with all the advantages that come with it.
Incremental Static Regeneration and edge rendering extend the model further. Pages can be regenerated in the background without requiring a full deploy. Edge functions make it possible to make certain areas of the page dynamic without weighing down the performance of the entire system. The line between static and dynamic becomes more fluid in the process — to the user’s benefit.
When Static Sites Are the Right Choice
For marketing websites, blogs, portfolios, documentation and many corporate sites, a static architecture is often the obvious choice today. The arguments: very good performance, inexpensive hosting without an application server, a small attack surface and easy scalability through CDN distribution.
- Very good performance through static delivery, for example from a CDN
- Inexpensive hosting without an application server
- Reduced attack surface thanks to the absence of database connections
- A good starting point for the Core Web Vitals
For highly dynamic applications with personalized content, real-time data or complex user interactions, the static model alone is not enough. But here too: hybrid approaches, in which the static part is maximized and the dynamic part is deliberately limited, are often the smarter choice than a fully dynamic architecture.