Why static sites still win

A static site generator turns markdown + templates into HTML at build time. No runtime database, no app server, no per-request rendering — the bytes are just there, ready to be served by any file host that knows what a directory looks like.

The boring case

It’s hard to overstate how good this story is in 2024. CDNs are everywhere; the marginal cost of serving a request from cache is essentially zero. There’s no scaling story to plan for, no failover to design, no security patches to chase down at 3 AM because some CMS plugin opened a hole.

You write markdown, you push to git, the site updates. That’s the whole deployment story.

The ageing case

A WordPress install from 2014 is a forensic exercise in 2024. A static HTML directory from 2014 still serves its content. The format is the format; browsers haven’t lost the ability to render <h1>.

When the next paradigm shift hits — and there will be one — your static site keeps working. That’s not nothing.