Choosing a technology stack for developing a static website
Published: 2020-10-30 20:08:52

In this blog post, we are going to share with you advice on choosing the right technology stack for developing a static website. Stay tuned!

Let's assume the this is the website in which content changes rarely and is managed by the site owner. And website visitor can only view it. The core values such as quality content and incredible visual experiences allow you or your business to promote itself.

Examples of such websites include:

-Landing page;
-Portfolio website;
-Business website.

Ususally static websites don’t require a backing CMS. A markup and content can be stored in the same place and served by a CDN provider. You’ll need the help of a web designer and a front-end developer to build it from scratch.

However, you should strongly consider using a page builder if your website doesn’t have something very special. By special we mean having complex animations, page transitions and built-in interactivity. Visit Awwwards if you want to see beautiful examples of sites with the unique designs. If visual exceling among competitors is not the primary goal of your business, page builders like Google Sites, Carrd or more advanced tools like Wix, WebFlow might be a great choice as well.

Don’t just listen to people who may say that you don’t need building tools to create a static website. Modern websites should have decent browser support and be developed as quickly as possible with the minimum number of kilobytes in output. Tools such as HTML template engines, CSS preprocessors, JS bundlers can help you with that. Luckily, extra effort isn’t needed to configure all these tools living in the era of static site generators — programs that take templates and a markup as an input, and produce static pages in output. To better understand what we’re talking about, check out the list of the most popular generators. For typical websites, the choice often depends on a developer's preferences. For example, Gatsby is a perfect choice for those that are familiar with React. Hugo is known as one of the fastest tools that is able to generate a page in less than 1ms. Jekyll can even generate a site from a plain text.

Do you like this post? Find more about tips and tricks in custom software development: https://www.axon.dev/services/software-product-development

Hosting a static website is usually simple. You need to upload static assets to a hosting provider either manually or using the continuous integration pipeline (many providers have an integration with GitHub and similar version control repository hosting services). The hosting strategies are divided into two groups, described below.

Services like AWS Amplify, Google Firebase, Azure Static Web Apps are parts of cloud giants and they provide the possibility of building deep integrations with the rest of their services. For example, using Amplify (which is actually a combination of S3 and CloudFront under the hood), AWS Cognito can further be included to add an authentication on the website. Despite being extremely configurable, sometimes they might be overkill in relation to the tools that are allocated to the second group.

The second group is about complete automatization. Tools like Netlify and Vercel allow you to develop, preview and publish content without a single line of configuration. They are probably built on top of big cloud providers, but hide all the complexity from the developer. As a result, you have a perfectly optimized development and deployment process. Nothing is ideal, first of all, you’re limited with the capabilities of a platform, so you should plan beforehand if a solution such as this suits you. Second, the monthly subscription fees for using these tools can be costly at scale.

In contrast to custom sites, page builders often handle hosting by themselves. All you have to do is press the “Publish” button and your website will be immediately available for all users from around the globe.