What Is a Static Website?
Websites can be classified into various categories. From one of the functional points of view, websites can be classified into static websites and dynamic websites. While many of you might have come across these two terms, it is important that you know the differences between the two so that you can decide which one will serve your purpose. So, in this article, I will talk about what is a static website. Read on to find out.
Find Out The Differences Between Static And Dynamic Websites Here
What Is a Static Website?
A website, as you know, is a collection of related web pages linked together under a common domain name. Now, if it is a static website, its content will appear the same to all users. That is, the different pages of the site will have fixed content which will be displayed in the same manner to every visitor to the website.
Let me elaborate with an example.
Let’s consider this website, blgxpria.com. If you visit here frequently, you will notice that the content in this site doesn’t remain the same. New blog posts are added frequently. Likewise, older content are updated.
The same thing happens on Facebook. Every time you log in to your account, you see different content. Also, the content on Facebook varies from one account to another.
Both blgxpria.com and Facebook are dynamic websites, where the content is not fixed.
On the other hand, a website, let’s say a website for a book or a movie, which doesn’t require dynamic content is a static website. It displays the same information all the time to everyone.
This is the most basic way to understand what is a static website. Having said that, when viewed, one may not find any major difference between the two types of websites. It is, therefore, important to understand what goes behind the scene of static websites.
Understanding Static Website
Static websites are the most basic type of websites built using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). In fact, before CSS came, it was only HTML pages, i.e. each page of the website was a separate HTML file. This means to change the content of the static website, one had to edit each of the HTML pages separately. For example, if the header or footer of the website had to be changed, all the HTML files needed to be changed separately.
This isn’t the case with a dynamic website. Before dynamic Content Management Systems (CMS), like WordPress came, all websites were static. This means, back in those days, to run a news website, for example, one had to edit/update the source code manually.
Now, this could be an extremely tedious task for large websites with thousands of web pages.
Check Out The Review Of Publii Static CMS Here
What Kind of Websites Can Be Static?
According to popular beliefs, static websites are suitable only when large chunks of data are not updated/added to the site regularly. This means, to create blogs, static websites are not practical.
However, this is changing rapidly and many large blogs are moving back to static websites because of the various advantages that static websites have compared to dynamic websites. Having said that, you need to have a little technical knowledge to run a static website.
Advantages of Static Websites
Few of the advantages of static websites are as under:
- In terms of security, static websites are safer than dynamic websites.
- Static websites load faster.
- Static websites are cheaper to host. In fact, many hosting services offer free hosting for static websites.
- Scalability is not a concern for static websites.
So, this more or less explains what is a static website. I hope I have been able to explain the basics of static websites.
If you have any question regarding what is a static website, feel free to drop a comment below and I will get back to you at the earliest.
