Generator

/ˌɛs-ɛs-ˈdʒiː/

n. “Pre-build your pages so they’re ready before the user arrives.”

SSG, short for Static Site Generation, is a web development approach where HTML pages are generated at build time rather than on each user request. Instead of dynamically rendering pages on the server or in the browser, the site’s content is compiled ahead of time into static files, which can be served quickly by a CDN or web server.

Key benefits of SSG include:

• Performance: Pre-built pages load faster because they don’t require server-side computation on each request.
• Security: Fewer dynamic processes mean fewer attack surfaces.
• Scalability: Serving static files is simple and efficient, allowing sites to handle high traffic easily.
• SEO-friendly: Fully rendered HTML is available to search engines immediately.

Frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby leverage SSG to pre-render pages during the build process. The static pages can optionally pull in dynamic content at runtime using client-side JavaScript or incremental regeneration techniques.

Here’s a conceptual example using Next.js to statically generate a page listing blog posts:

// pages/index.js
import fs from 'fs';
import path from 'path';

export default function Home({ posts }) {
return (

Blog Posts

{posts.map(post => (
{post.title}
))}
);
}

// Runs at build time
export async function getStaticProps() {
const filePath = path.join(process.cwd(), 'data/posts.json');
const jsonData = fs.readFileSync(filePath);
const posts = JSON.parse(jsonData);

return { props: { posts } };
}

In this example, the blog posts are read from a JSON file at build time. Next.js generates static HTML pages so that when a user requests the site, it can be served instantly without additional server computation.

In essence, SSG is about preparing your content in advance. By shifting rendering to build time, websites become faster, safer, and more scalable, providing users with near-instant load times and developers with predictable, maintainable builds.