SSGStatic Site Generation
Pre-rendering every page to HTML at build time so the CDN can serve them as static files — fast, cheap and cacheable everywhere.
· Reviewed by senior engineers
Static Site Generation (SSG) pre-renders every page of a site to HTML at build time. The output is plain files that any CDN can serve in milliseconds. There is no server doing per-request work, no database call on the hot path, and no cold start. Frameworks like Next.js, Astro, Hugo, Eleventy and Gatsby all centre on SSG.
It is the right default for content that doesn't change per user or per second: marketing sites, documentation, blogs, glossaries (yes, this page), product catalogues that rebuild on publish. SSG wins on Core Web Vitals, hosting cost and resilience — if your origin goes down, the CDN keeps serving.
The limits are obvious. If your catalogue has a million SKUs, building every page on every deploy is slow. If prices change every minute, static HTML is stale before it ships. The answers are Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), partial hydration and hybrid strategies that mix static shells with dynamic islands.
Devinsta defaults to SSG for everything that isn't personalised, then escalates to ISR or SSR only where the data or the audience demands it. Most sites need far less dynamism than their first instinct suggests.