What is a website builder? How is it different from CMS and how does it work? These are the questions that will be answered in this article. Static website generator is a tool and system for managing and producing static websites. Developers and people who are interested in working with the command line have always had a positive view of this tool.
For this reason, there are many tools for producing static sites on the web. In this article, we will first introduce you to the concept of static site builder and then introduce some famous static site production tools.
Table of Contents
What is a website builder?
A static website builder takes source files and creates a completely static web design.
There are many static website builders that can be used for a variety of purposes. Some of them are for creating photo gallery websites that take pictures from photo folders and others help you to create document websites. Most of them help you to manage a normal website with a blog.
To understand the difference between static website builders, you need to know how dynamic CMSs like WordPress work.
How do dynamic systems work?
In this article, we refer to WordPress as a dynamic CMS, but this can also be true of other social media like Drupal.
When a user enters a page from a WordPress website, a request is sent to the web server (Nginx), and then forwarded to WordPress. WordPress, which created this page with a number of templates, takes its content and other data from the database and sends the entire HTML page to the user.
How does a static website builder work?
In server configuration, static sites created by static site builders are captured by the server.
Why use static site builder?
Now that we know the basic differences between static and dynamic webmasters, let’s see why we use one of them.
Less complexity
Jekyll is a static site builder that has an add-on formatting language called Liquid, so if you know HTML, CSS and JavaScript, it can be the first step to getting acquainted with static site builders. In the following, we will introduce you to Jekyll.
In setting up a static server, all that is needed is a web server that can deliver static files.
On the other hand, to build WordPress themes, in addition to HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you must be familiar with PHP, MySQL and WordPress API.
You need to configure the web server, PHP and MySQL to set up the WordPress server. Then WordPress plugins, databases and files are copied from the server development space.
Speed
Providing a static site is very fast, because all a web server needs is to restore a file. Before deploying the site, make sure that the site is well optimized. This is done by running all the source code through minifires, optimizing images, using tools to remove unused CSS, and other techniques.
With every request, WordPress must build the entire page from scratch. This includes collecting template folders and retrieving any content and data from the database.
If you use a WordPress plugin, it will do more work, because each plugin needs more time to process and more data from the database.
Much of this process can be limited by cache; Cache means that when a page is processed, a copy of it is saved for future requests.
Optimizations such as minification can be done to speed up the site, but this usually happens instantly.
Security
There are only static folders and web servers. There is nothing dynamic that wants to be abused. Access to the server is possible if a hacker finds a vulnerability in the web server, but the risk is very low.
Hackers are usually looking for old WordPress sites where known abuses have taken place. So the most important thing to keep WordPress safe is to keep it up to date. If the configuration is incorrect, the database can be accessed. There are a number of security plugins that can help prevent common misconceptions.
Every WordPress plugin we install is accessible to hackers.
Measurability
A single server can handle a lot of traffic if it only serves static files. But if more resources are needed, balanced traffic can be loaded from multiple servers. It is easy to set up, you just need to make sure that the site is static on all servers.
To scale WordPress, you can extend the WordPress environment to multiple servers and have your database instance on a separate server. Sometimes it is necessary to have multiple database servers, although it adds levels of complexity.
Version control (version)
All source code for the Jekyll site can be in a version control system such as Git. With Jet you can go back to any version of the site in its entire history. It also acts as an offsite backup, in case you need to restore a server, any file you need is in the jet repository.
You can create directories that allow you to work on multiple versions of the site and then merge them. This is especially useful when you have a large team of developers working at the same time. This means that they can clone the production environment on their local devices with minimal effort.
If we go one step further, we can even have the source code in the open source repository on GitHub, as well as anyone who updates and suggests that they integrate it on our live site.
In WordPress you can return changes to your personal blog post. Make sure that the database is backed up regularly and that the themes, plugins, and tools that are loaded are left behind or tracked.