I too have been thinking a lot about these same things. Great article, didn’t know about the SEO benefits. We should always strive to suppress needless overhead, if nothing else it decreases the potential attack surface.
It sounds great until you have a few hundred pages (e.g. a blog). Nobody wants to manually update layout changes or fix navigation items across so many pages.
Of course there are plenty of static site generators that will help with that.
For (internal) web applications, frameworks still win, because the difficult part isn't layout rendering, but the dynamic interactions on the screen. I don't think reloading the whole page on every click, even if it's super fast, is the way to go.
While I'm a big proponent of web based applications... there are a LOT of places where a static site generator and even a management interface over the top makes more sense than the CMS systems that many choose to use, which IMO shouldn't ever be public facing (or at least without a login, and separated from displayed content).
Blog content in particular. It amazes me that anyone actually uses the likes of Wordpress day to day.
It's a matter of convenience and eco-system. Here on HN you can see comments of people praising all the various static site generators (SSG), yet basically all of them require you to run some CLI, copy around files, manually fiddle with some theme and then awkwardly upload the files somewhere. People will praise that it's Markdown and integrates with Git, which misses the day to day use case of 99.999% of people when it comes to websites.
Want to have some interesting facts, links, images, etc. in a sidebar, but only for some pages, etc.? The static site generator goes up in flames or needs a lot of manual tweaking. In WordPress and any other CMS it's either built-in or one plugin install away.
Want to edit some published page, create and preview something new? With SSG you need to make sure you have the latest version locally, then edit the file, create a new commit or copy the file, push the change, wait for some pipeline to run and only then will you see the actual result.
Don't get me wrong SSG are great, but they are solutions for very technical people who like to fiddle with workflows and automations. If you want a WYSIWYG and one-click install experience, you end up with some CMS.
And that hasn't even touched the whole web shop integration topic.
There were a handful of decent blog manager apps at one point... I saw an example of a new one a few weeks ago. It would be nice if the integrations got better. There's nothing preventing a good UI tool for SSG publishing for a blog, or for that matter a "plugin" ecosystem... I mean Wordpress is entrenched, and clunky. Doesn't mean there can't be alternatives.
I've created a couple of production web sites that way. I used htp, which allows me to create multiple pages with the same layout by using a mechanism similar to C's #include. This is used at development time, so the Web pages generated are all static (no server-side includes), but by editing a single file and "recompiling" I can change the layout, look and feel of the entire web site.
I too have been thinking a lot about these same things. Great article, didn’t know about the SEO benefits. We should always strive to suppress needless overhead, if nothing else it decreases the potential attack surface.
It sounds great until you have a few hundred pages (e.g. a blog). Nobody wants to manually update layout changes or fix navigation items across so many pages.
Of course there are plenty of static site generators that will help with that.
For (internal) web applications, frameworks still win, because the difficult part isn't layout rendering, but the dynamic interactions on the screen. I don't think reloading the whole page on every click, even if it's super fast, is the way to go.
While I'm a big proponent of web based applications... there are a LOT of places where a static site generator and even a management interface over the top makes more sense than the CMS systems that many choose to use, which IMO shouldn't ever be public facing (or at least without a login, and separated from displayed content).
Blog content in particular. It amazes me that anyone actually uses the likes of Wordpress day to day.
It's a matter of convenience and eco-system. Here on HN you can see comments of people praising all the various static site generators (SSG), yet basically all of them require you to run some CLI, copy around files, manually fiddle with some theme and then awkwardly upload the files somewhere. People will praise that it's Markdown and integrates with Git, which misses the day to day use case of 99.999% of people when it comes to websites.
Want to have some interesting facts, links, images, etc. in a sidebar, but only for some pages, etc.? The static site generator goes up in flames or needs a lot of manual tweaking. In WordPress and any other CMS it's either built-in or one plugin install away.
Want to edit some published page, create and preview something new? With SSG you need to make sure you have the latest version locally, then edit the file, create a new commit or copy the file, push the change, wait for some pipeline to run and only then will you see the actual result.
Don't get me wrong SSG are great, but they are solutions for very technical people who like to fiddle with workflows and automations. If you want a WYSIWYG and one-click install experience, you end up with some CMS.
And that hasn't even touched the whole web shop integration topic.
PS: My blog runs on WordPress
There were a handful of decent blog manager apps at one point... I saw an example of a new one a few weeks ago. It would be nice if the integrations got better. There's nothing preventing a good UI tool for SSG publishing for a blog, or for that matter a "plugin" ecosystem... I mean Wordpress is entrenched, and clunky. Doesn't mean there can't be alternatives.
Server side includes are another way to solve this problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
I've created a couple of production web sites that way. I used htp, which allows me to create multiple pages with the same layout by using a mechanism similar to C's #include. This is used at development time, so the Web pages generated are all static (no server-side includes), but by editing a single file and "recompiling" I can change the layout, look and feel of the entire web site.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/htp/files/
Why I'm Writing Pure HTML and CSS in 2025 - because our work intranet WYSIWYG editor is the worst heap of garbage to ship in the last decade.