Dimensional Data

Most websites today fall into two categories – dynamic sites and static sites. Dynamic sites are interactive, and the user experience can be tailored to the visitor. These are the ones that might remember who you are across visits or deliver content that’s most applicable to the region you’re visiting from. They rely on a content management system (CMS) or database for rendering and can continue to grow in complexity as the organization’s needs grow. Static sites, however, generally display the same content to all users. They use server-side rendering to serve HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. While CMS backends have made dynamic sites easier to launch and maintain, static sites continue to grow in popularity. Static sites’ advantages include speed, security, and SEO. They’re also easy to maintain and highly scalable. Because the static site generators (SSG) store an already-compiled page on a CDN, they load a lot faster. All static site generators can be exciting and fun, but some require time and effort on configurations, detailed templating, or management tweaks. My team and I joke that I am one of the top blog-less SSG experts, so in this blog post, I’ll walk you through a toolkit for evaluating your project and then share some SSGs that deploy to GitLab Pages. Here are the SSGs I’ll review in this post: Hugo is written in Go with support for multi-language sites and complex content strategy. Zola is written in Rust with a single binary, no dependencies, and flexible features like Sass compilation. Jekyll is written in Ruby, built for blogging, and has a large collection of plugins and themes. Hexo is Node.js based with support for multiple templating engines, integrations with NPM packages, and one command deployment. GatsbyJS is React-based, works with any CMS, API, or database, and can be used for building headless experiences. Astro is Javascript-based, supports multiple frameworks, and is known for on-demand rendering via partial hydration. With so many static site generators available, selecting one for your project can be overwhelming. When evaluating which SSG is right for you, here are a few things to consider about your project, use case, and the type of work you’re looking to put into the site. Identify the use case It’s important to understand your site’s needs, purpose, and content. Are you building a personal blog, a landing page for a product, or documentation for a tech project? Consider whether you need a streamlined editor experience, content, and interactions with your user. The better you can identify the experience you’d like your visitors to have, the easier it will be to pick the feature set that can best support it. Specify languages and frameworks There are so many static site generators out there that you can find one in nearly every language and framework. Consider whether you want to learn a new language or use something you’re familiar with. Depending on how much time you’d like to invest in setting up, you should also review the installation details and see if you’re familiar with the templating language, dependencies, and theming layer. Review the Ecosystem Many static site generators will have starter repositories or sample sites where you can play around with functionality and components before diving into your project. When reviewing the ecosystem, think about the limitations of the […]