Most websites today fall into two categories – dynamic sites and static sites. Dynamic sites are interactive, and the user experience can be tailored to the visitor. These are the ones that might remember who you are across visits or deliver content that’s most applicable to the region you’re visiting from. They rely on a content management system (CMS) or database for rendering and can continue to grow in complexity as the organization’s needs grow. Static sites, however, generally display the same content to all users. They use server-side rendering to serve HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. While CMS backends have made dynamic sites easier to launch and maintain, static sites continue to grow in popularity. Static sites’ advantages include speed, security, and SEO. They’re also easy to maintain and highly scalable. Because the static site generators (SSG) store an already-compiled page on a CDN, they load a lot faster.

All static site generators can be exciting and fun, but some require time and effort on configurations, detailed templating, or management tweaks. My team and I joke that I am one of the top blog-less SSG experts, so in this blog post, I’ll walk you through a toolkit for evaluating your project and then share some SSGs that deploy to GitLab Pages.

Here are the SSGs I’ll review in this post:

• Hugo is written in Go with support for multi-language sites and complex content strategy.
• Zola is written in Rust with a single binary, no dependencies, and flexible features like Sass compilation.
• Jekyll is written in Ruby, built for blogging, and has a large collection of plugins and themes.
• Hexo is Node.js based with support for multiple templating engines, integrations with NPM packages, and one command deployment.
• GatsbyJS is React-based, works with any CMS, API, or database, and can be used for building headless experiences.
• Astro is Javascript-based, supports multiple frameworks, and is known for on-demand rendering via partial hydration.