Static Site Generators (SSG)

We’ve seen a massive shift in websites using various technologies to present data relevant to the user seeking to find certain product or service over the last few years. Database driven websites are not new technology; we see on-demand scripted pages everywhere, and it’s because of how fast it can make a website render, scale and, better yet – perform in the browser.

But all this comes with its own set of complications, such that it’s not great for SEO because pages are rendered only when the user visits a particular page or inputs a certain word or pharase. Websites built in this format can generally be on the larger side as they typically use a framework, and their bundles get large.

So what is the solution? Along came SSG’s (Static Site Generators) to fix these issues. The general idea is that your content is not being requested and rendered every time a user visits a page from a source (generally a CMS or database), but instead, these requests are generated at the build process and stored as HTML files, meaning the user is only requesting a 10kb file instead of a 2MB file. Every time you hit save in the CMS, the pages are generated and saved as flat files.

This means it’s better for SEO as the content is already rendered and easy for search engine crawlers. The performance is increased, and the website’s size (particularly the Javascript and dynamic items) is decreased because it will remove any unused code before the user has viewed it.

Another benefit is that you can have your content separate from the visual representation of the website. It allows you to use the content elsewhere, whether this is in an app or EPOS system.

We have rendered websites with thousands of pages – all appear as html pages with a low file size and a good number of individual pages indexed (100+ instead of just one page) on the search engines.

Why not have us conduct a free review and see what we can offer to your organisation?