Static Site Generator (SSG)

A static site generator (SSG) is a tool that takes your content and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files. When a visitor requests a page, the web server just sends the file — there’s no database query, no PHP execution, no server-side rendering happening in real time. The entire site is pre-built.

Popular standalone SSGs include Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, and Astro. These tools have no built-in content management interface; you write content in files and run a build command. Statamic, by contrast, is a full CMS with a content editing interface that can also generate a fully static site.

Statamic handles this through its static caching system. You can configure it to write rendered HTML to disk, so subsequent requests for the same URL get served as static files. Taken further, Statamic can generate a complete static site and push it to a CDN or static hosting platform like Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages. This combines the editorial experience of a CMS with the delivery characteristics of a static site.

WordPress doesn’t do this natively. There are plugins — WP2Static, Simply Static — that attempt to crawl a WordPress site and export static HTML, but they’re add-ons to a system that wasn’t designed for it. The results work to varying degrees, but edge cases around dynamic content, search, and forms require workarounds.

The case for going static usually comes down to performance and security. A static file has no attack surface beyond the web server itself. There’s no PHP to exploit, no database to inject, no plugin vulnerabilities to patch. Hosting is also simpler and often cheaper — many CDN-based static hosts are free at modest traffic levels.

The limitation is that truly dynamic features (user authentication, real-time search, form submissions, personalization) require either a third-party service or a separate backend. For most marketing sites, documentation, and content-heavy sites, that’s a reasonable tradeoff.

If you’re migrating from WordPress to Statamic and considering going static, the hosting guide covers the deployment options. The comparison page also touches on why the static option changes the operational picture compared to a traditionally hosted WordPress site.