Static Site Generation

A build-time technique where all web pages are pre-generated as static HTML files and served directly from a content delivery network, resulting in extremely fast load times and high scalability at low cost.

Static sites are fast, secure, and cheap to host because there is no server processing on each request. For marketing sites, blogs, and documentation where content does not change per user, static generation is almost always the optimal choice.

A founder builds her marketing website using Next.js with static site generation. Pages load in under 200 milliseconds globally because they are served from a CDN as pre-built files. Hosting costs are near zero compared to the dynamic server she previously maintained.