Every website project starts with a quiet architectural decision that most stakeholders never see: how pages get built and delivered. Get it right and everything downstream is easier. Get it wrong and you'll fight your own stack for years.
Static: fast, cheap, and cacheable
If your content changes weekly rather than hourly — marketing sites, portfolios, documentation — static generation is hard to beat. Pages are built once and served from a CDN, so they're fast everywhere and nearly free to host.
The tradeoff: content updates require a rebuild, and anything personalized needs client-side JavaScript.
Server-rendered: fresh on every request
Dashboards, stores with live inventory, anything behind a login — these need pages assembled per request. You pay for that freshness with servers to run and more ways for things to fail.
Hybrid: the pragmatic default
Modern frameworks let you choose per page:
- Marketing pages: prerendered at build time
- Blog and content: server-rendered from a database, cached hard
- Admin and account areas: fully dynamic, never cached
How to decide in one meeting
Ask two questions per page type. How often does this content change? Does it differ per visitor? Rarely and no: static. Often or yes: dynamic. Most sites end up hybrid, and that's not indecision — it's precision.