Static site generation (SSG)
Static site generation pre-renders every page to plain HTML at build time, then serves the HTML directly from a CDN with no server-side execution per request. SSG produces the fastest possible page loads (no compute per request) and the simplest hosting model, but every content change requires a rebuild.
SSG fits content that's mostly stable: marketing sites, documentation, blogs, landing pages. The build time scales with page count, so sites with thousands of pages start to suffer (a 10K-page site might take 30 minutes to build). The traditional answer was ISR (rebuild only the pages that changed); newer frameworks lean on edge SSR with aggressive caching to get most of the SSG benefit with shorter feedback cycles. SSG remains the right default for pure-content sites where the editorial cadence is daily-to-weekly rather than real-time.
Related terms
- Server-side rendering (SSR)
Server-side rendering generates the HTML for a page on the server per request — the response is fully-formed HTML that the browser can render immediately without waiting for client-side JavaScript.
- Incremental static regeneration (ISR)
Incremental static regeneration is the hybrid where pages are pre-rendered to static HTML but the framework refreshes them in the background after a defined revalidation period — combining SSG's first-byte speed with SSR's freshness.
- CDN edge
A CDN edge is one of the geographically distributed points-of-presence operated by a content delivery network — typically hundreds of locations worldwide where static and cacheable content is served from the location closest to the user.