The Case for Static

There's a certain irony in the fact that the web started static, went dynamic, and is now swinging back toward static again. But the static sites of today aren't the hand-coded HTML pages of 1998. They're generated, optimized, and deployed to edge networks that serve them in milliseconds.

The pitch for server-rendered everything was compelling: dynamic content, personalization, real-time data. But most sites don't need most of that most of the time. A blog post doesn't need to be rendered on every request. A product page doesn't change every second.

The performance argument

A static file served from a CDN is as fast as the web gets. No cold starts, no database queries, no server-side rendering overhead. The Time to First Byte is essentially the network latency to your nearest edge node. You can't beat physics.

And when you do need dynamic behavior, you can add it surgically. An island of interactivity in a sea of static HTML. The best of both worlds, without paying the cost of either at all times.