Encyclopedia / Hosting & delivery

Static site

Pages built ahead of time and served as plain files.

Every visitor gets the same prebuilt HTML. That makes it very fast, cheap, and hard to hack, because there's no server code to exploit. Portfolios, docs and blogs fit here well. A static site can still be interactive with JavaScript and can call APIs.

Related terms

Dynamic site Static site generator Rendering: SSG, SSR, CSR

Where it shows up in a page load

  1. Step 5: Cache miss → origin. If the edge has no fresh copy, it forwards the request to the origin. On a static site the origin just reads a file. On a dynamic site a server or serverless function runs code to build the page.

Watch the full request journey →

More in Hosting & delivery

Where the files live and how they reach a visitor quickly.

Web server / host CDN Edge Dynamic site Caching Serverless function Redirect Status codes

Open in the interactive encyclopedia →