Static Sites Over the Years
At Engage, we’ve been making websites since forever. With the resurgence of static HTML websites, we wanted to take a stroll down memory lane and think about all of the ways HTML files have been a part of our website journey through the years.
Even before working on websites professionally, as a teenager in the early 2000s I was using Geocities and similar hosting platforms to manage my personal website by simply editing individual HTML files. The main downside here, aside from the limitations of browsers, was that any changes which applied to multiple pages required touching each page individually.
Caching Dynamic Pages
Fast forward a few years, I was working at Engage on a project for True Value Hardware, where we created a system to provide individualized websites to their thousands of retailers. True Value approached Engage because of our expertise with the DotNetNuke (later DNN Platform) web application platform, so we used DNN’s multi-portal functionality to support building out individual websites with shared content. However, the more retailers that were onboarded to the system, the slower their homepages became. We determined that we were hitting some limits within DNN and looked into potential solutions. The simplest approach ended up being enabling page caching within DNN. While this was all built upon a monolithic, dynamic web application, at its heart the solution was to save the HTML of the home page and serve that static HTML instead of re-rendering the page dynamically, boosting performance dramatically.
Static Site Generators
A few years later, we leaned more fully into static HTML when we designed a system for Heartland Dental to serve marketing websites for their thousands of dentists. From the get-go, Heartland was interested in the performance, security, and uptime benefits of serving static content. Many years later, the public-facing sites still have much better performance than a similar dynamic site, they’ve had no security-related issues, and have never had an outage.
Once we’d decided on static sites, the challenge of the project was designing the content management system, and feeding the right content into the static site generator (SSG). We leveraged our experience with DNN Platform to use its meager content management with its multi-tenant features, roles and permissions, and extensibility to create a custom solution which fed into Wyam (later Statiq) as the generator. With hindsight into the true customer needs, as well as a time machine to make use of tools that didn’t exist at the time, we would do this differently today. We would probably lean on the extensive flexibility of Payload CMS for the content management side, and either Eleventy or Astro for the SSG.
Content Management Systems
While we’ve been major players in the DNN Platform space for decades, we also recognize that it’s not the right tool for many of the problems inherent to creating websites. It’s a useful platform upon which to build custom web-based applications, but it is not a content management system (CMS), and so content-driven sites may not make good use of the tools it does provide. When looking to get the benefits of a static site, a headless CMS is usually the best approach. In this way, the content editing experience is focused on the details of the content, and a separate tool (the SSG) can be used that’s focused on translating that content into a website.
For our sister brand Connecting Members, we’ve started using Payload CMS and Astro to create small “business card” sites for insurance agents. Additionally, we’ve migrated engagesoftware.com from DNN to Astro and seen significant performance gains, as well as simplified control over SEO and accessibility. What’s old is new again, and we’re now starting projects asking whether a static HTML approach will meet business needs better than an integrated, dynamic solution.
Conclusion
The approach to building websites has changed a lot over the years. We’re working to recapture the simplicity of static HTML files, while still holding on to the benefits that dynamic content management gives to marketers and administrators. By adding constraints to a solution (e.g. the public-facing site is only serving static content), we can unleash creativity and benefits around the rest of the approach. We’re finding tools like Astro and Payload CMS to be refreshing and exciting, while also delivering top-tier results.