Top 14 Best Static Site Generators (SSG)

Static Site Generators are easy to use, simple, and provide a fast and scalable environment for building websites. They are essential for Jamstack Development – a modern way to build websites.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this post:

• What are static site generators and how do they work?

• Why it’s worth using SSG?

• What to think about when choosing an SSG for building your website?

• The best static site generators - the most popular ones and the most intriguing contenders

There’s a lot to talk about so let’s get right to it!

What Is a Static Site Generator (SSG)?

A static site generator (SSG) is a tool used in modern web development to create fast and efficient websites. Unlike traditional content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, SSGs generate web pages during the build process and serve them as static HTML files.

This means that each time a user visits a page, the server does not need to fetch data from a database or generate the page on the spot. Instead, the pre-rendered HTML files are delivered instantly, resulting in lightning-fast loading times and improved performance.

They provide a simplified development workflow by separating content from the presentation layer. This separation allows developers to focus on building the website's functionality using modern tools and frameworks, while content creators can easily update and manage the site's content through a headless CMS.

Additionally, static sites are highly secure and scalable, as there is no need for server-side processing or database queries.

How Do SSGs Work?

In contrast to the traditional development approach, static site generators don't require having a database or other external data sources to generate a site. In traditional websites, the servers generate the view on demand every time a page is requested.

SSG makes it all much easier. The static site generator renders the page at the build time. In other words, it takes a built page stored on a CDN (Content Delivery Network) and serves it to the user whenever – and only then – he or she visits a website. Additionally, to generate a site, SSGs can use a database, REST API, Markdown files, or other locations.

In the simplest form, generating a website with SSG follows this scheme:

To sum it up, all the content and data you have goes through SSG and templates to generate the final product – a fully functional website. And you don’t need a database or servers.

The result is a fully responsive website with fast loading time and high performance. It’s helpful, especially in the case of having many fixed elements on the website like the layout, themes, images, a lot of content, navigation menu, or logos.

Why Should You Use a Static Site Generator?

The variety of easy-to-use SSGs means development teams have plenty of options to find the perfect fit for their specific requirements. Additionally, new tools have revolutionized the way developers work.

Automated website updates make things easier, removing the need to manually dig into code.

What are the advantages of Static Site Generators?

• Customization: Developers can use their favorite frameworks, languages, and tools to create a unique development environment.

• Variety of Options: The wide selection of SSGs ensures there's one that perfectly matches the specific needs of every project.

• Streamlined Workflow: Modern tools automate website updates, making maintenance simpler and saving valuable development time.

As with any technology, SSGs have their pros and cons. The advantages often far outweigh the drawbacks, especially for projects that prioritize speed, security, and a smooth developer experience.

What Are The Benefits of Static Site Generators?

SSGs provide a powerful way to create static websites that still offer the advanced features of dynamic sites.

When you clearly define your needs, SSGs can deliver a host of benefits, including significant performance improvements, enhanced security, and improved search engine optimization (SEO).

With their ability to pre-render and deliver static HTML files, SSGs empower website owners to provide a seamless user experience and boost their online presence.

1. Jamstack Compatibility

Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) is gaining popularity, with a growing number of serverless functions, frameworks, and tools that generate static files while still allowing for the creation of complex interactive sites.

In Jamstack, the front end is pre-built into static pages and assets during the build process, enabling content delivery via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is easily accomplished with SSGs, making them a perfect fit for the headless architecture.

Many SSGs are fully compatible with Jamstack and the headless approach, so if you're considering this architecture, you can be confident in building a fast, reliable, and high-performing website.

2. Better Performance – Advantage of Static Web Page Generator

SSGs deliver website content via a CDN, which means a shorter travel distance for requests and fewer systems to interact with. Static websites are generally lighter and faster than dynamic ones, positively impacting your Core Web Vitals, essential indicators of website performance.

This translates to faster page load times and quicker responses, allowing users to smoothly explore your website or app.

While SSGs alone won't make your website lightning-fast, using them in conjunction with other tools like CDNs, APIs, and Markup is key.

3. Security and Easy Maintenance

SSGs simplify your website's infrastructure, making it less vulnerable to cyber attacks, unexpected traffic surges, and crashes.

With no extra server work required for each request, this automated build process reduces the chance of failures and improves reliability.

Without servers and databases to manage, you don't have to worry about complex infrastructure maintenance. SSGs give you fewer elements to work with and fewer resources to manage, making it easier to identify and fix bugs, ensuring the smooth operation of your platform.

4. Cost-Effective Solution

Since SSGs don't require a database or other external data sources, you save on maintenance costs, resulting in significant savings for your business.

Best Static Site Generators - Overview of Top Solutions

If you’re looking for the perfect SSG, you may be faced with a serious puzzle. There are over 300 static site generators available on the market so it may not be an easy choice to pick the one. Most static site generators are written in JavaScript, however you'll also find ones based on other programming languages.

Some are advanced, others offer limited options or aim at different niches. But to help you choose the right SSG, we’ve gathered a list of the best 14 static site generators to use. Let’s check them one by one and see why it’s worth using them.

1. Gatsby (JS)

Best for: Jamstack beginners and developers who want a flexible work environment

Gatsby is one of the most popular SSGs. It's a React-based open-source framework that lets you create websites and apps. It offers an ecosystem of Plugins, Themes, and Starters to help you quickly and effectively build and deploy a website.

Gatsby and Jamstack go pretty well together, especially for websites that don't require much data and dynamic content. It's most suitable for new Jamstack developers. But it can also be helpful for those who need a unified, elastic set of tools to flexibly create websites and improve the developer experience. Gatsby allows you to work with the latest web technologies, provides an environment for easy deployment, and is known for its scalability.

Key features:

• With Gatsby’s data layer, you can combine data from multiple sources

• Uses GraphQL to manage site data

• Rich Gatsby Plugin Library allows you to add and configure plugins to build new features for your website

• Gatsby Image component lets you create images dynamically from data

• A lot of starter sites with the possibility to customize them

• Works well with Netlify

• Gives you access to many APIs

2. Hugo (Go)

Best for: fast and efficient site generation

Hugo is a static site generator built in an open-source model. It’s written in Go. Hugo is known for its speed and security.

You can use it to build websites with a lot of content such as blogs, company sites, documentation, a single landing page, or a site with lots of pages. Hugo is best for people who prefer to write in a text editor rather than in a browser.

Key features:

• Fast build times (<1 ms per page)

• Convenient content management

• Cross-platform (you can use it on macOS, Linux, Windows, and more)

• Lets you freely operate with URLs – Hugo supports permalinks, aliases, link canonicalization, and multiple options for handling relative vs absolute URLs, allows you to customize links

• Rich theming

• Integrated Google Analytics support

• You can host your sites on Netlify, GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and more, and via CDNs

3. Next (JS)

Best for: building hybrid websites and web applications

Next.js is a React-based web framework. It gives a lot of flexibility as it can be used for building web applications that are fully server-side rendered (SSR), statically pre-rendered (SSG), or hybrid SSG/SSR applications.

Next.js provides a great developer experience with its set of tools and functionalities. It’s suitable for building all types of pages for different businesses and industries.

Key features:

• Image optimization

• Rendering your content in different ways, depending on your application's use case: SSR, SSG, CSR, dynamic routing, ISR

• Automatic code splitting for faster page loads

• Built-in CSS and Sass support, as well as support for any CSS-in-JS library

• Fully extendable

4. Eleventy / 11ty (JS)

Best for: simple site building and deploying

Eleventy (11ty) static site generator is perfect for people looking for a simple solution. By default, it’s zero-config and has flexible configuration options. It's also a good JavaScript alternative to Jekyll. However, it’s important not to confuse 11ty with a JavaScript framework.

Eleventy is praised for its performance and scalability, as well as its ease of use. It can help your dev team quickly and conveniently build and deploy websites.

Key features:

• Works with multiple template languages (HTML, Markdown, JavaScript, Mustache, .ejs files, and more)

• Pre-rendered templates ensure the high performance of your website

• Eleventy can run in serverless mode

• Easy data migration, adaptation, and configuration within the templates

5. Jekyll (Ruby)

Best for: lightweight and intuitive website building

Jekyll is a Ruby-based SSG that aims at simplifying the developer experience. It’s a fine solution for not so advanced developers as it allows you to quickly build websites and further deepen your knowledge. It’s a good starting point for beginners.

Although you can use Jekyll to build any site, it’s best for websites with static blogs and lots of text.

Key features:

• Free hosting on GitHub pages

• Jekyll is a lightweight, easy to use static site generator

• A large community that contributes to the constant growth and proper maintenance of Jekyll, and helps to find necessary resources

6. R Markdown (R)

Best for: generating sites for high-quality documents, reports, presentations, and dashboards

R Markdown is a package for R language developers designed to show the results of data analysis. It combines the functionality of writing and executing code and generating output reports, e.g., in HTML format, which enables later presentation of the results of work in the form of a web page.

R Markdown is also a framework integrated with the IDE "Rstudio", which allows for interactive preparation of data analysis. This SSG lets you turn your data analysis into interactive sites easily accessible to a wide audience.

Key features:

• Designed for easy reproducibility

• Calculation code and descriptions are contained in the same file

• Results are automatically generated from the source code

• Lets you use multiple languages including R, Python, and SQL

7. Pelican (Python)

Best for: quick development of simple websites

Pelican is a static site generator written in Python. It doesn’t require a database or the use of server-side logic. It’s a simple tool that uses command-line commands to create content from source data.

Pelican offers an easy to use interface with version control systems and web hooks. Additionally, the completely static output is simple to host anywhere.

Key features:

• Ability to generate web pages for publishing chronological content such as articles, blog posts

• Easy integration with external services such as Twitter, or Google Analytics

• Publication of content in multiple languages

8. Sculpin (PHP)

Best for: users knowing PHP programming language for webmastering

Sculpin is a static site generator written in PHP, which can be an added value for users switching from WordPress, for example. It converts Markdown files to a static HTML file and uses Twig templating engine in the process.

Key features:

• Sculpin is built on a simple and beginner webmasters friendly PHP language

• The modern Twig templating engine is easy to learn, extensible, concise, flexible, and widely documented

• Built-in 'Composer' for automatic version management of dependent libraries

9. Docusaurus (JS)

Best for: building rich-text websites and documentation

Docusaurus is a tool that converts Markdown files (user-prepared content, on which you should focus your full attention, not on technical support of the publishing process) to HTML files ready for publishing. It uses React, which makes it easy to extend and customize the project layout.

Key features:

• Uses Crowdin to prepare translations into more than 70 languages

• Content versioning synchronized with project versions

• Use of Algolia for dynamic content search

10. Publii

Best for: generating sites dedicated to content and SEO (blogs, landing pages, company sites)

A tool different from the others because it’s prepared as a desktop application with a GUI, not as a tool using command-lines. Publii is an application that you run on your computer and generate a page from your content.

The built-in tool allows you to quickly publish to the hosting of your choice. It’s also possible to convert an existing WordPress site to Publii.

Key features:

• Ease of use, making the tool intuitive for everyone

• Built-in tools to optimize content for SEO

• Designed for quick operation of generated pages on different devices thanks to Google AMP technology

11. Gridsome (Vue JS)

Best for: creating extremely fast and well-performing websites

Gridsome SSG is written for the JavaScript framework Vue.js whose main idea is to build pages at a super-fast pace. When using Gridsome, you can use multiple parallel data sources such as CMS, importing data from files (JSON, Markdown) or API. Uses modern tools (GraphQL & all the power of Node.js)

Working on the local project allows for instant hot-reloading after every change. You don’t need any external servers or databases to maintain the project as all operations are performed directly on files.

Key features:

• Easy installation

• Generation of static PWAs

• SEO-friendly: Grindsome generates static HTML which enables search engines to easily find the content

12. Scully (Angular)

Best for: building fast apps and websites with Angular

Scully static site generator is written for the Angular framework. The tool transforms an existing project into statistical HTML and CSS files, each of is a finished, view-ready piece of your application.

That enables a good time optimization of transferring content to the user, due to the multiple reductions of the volume of transferred data and no need for the application to generate in real-time.

Key features:

• End-to-end content delivery to users, with no back-end support required

• Immediate availability of content to users

• The ability to use the Single Page Application (SPA)

• Scully is SEO-friendly

13. Hexo (JS)

Best for: creating blogs with lightweight tools in a simple environment

Hexo static site generator is a simple and fast tool written for the JavaScript framework Node.js. It’s simple because of the ability to deploy a site (e.g., to GitHub or Heroku) by using only one command, and fast because its capabilities allow you to build hundreds of files in seconds.

Hexo is fast, easy to use, and provides a smooth developer experience with plugins, themes, and easy deployment.

Key features:

• A wide library of different, ready-to-use themes

• Hexo JS supports Markdown (GitHub Flavored Markdown) and Octopress plugins

• Ability to install additional, external plugins

14. Harp (JS)

Best for: building website with build-in preprocessing and no need to work on configuration

Harp is a maintenance-free SSG in terms of web server configuration with built-in preprocessing. The code is automatically preprocessed and served to the browser as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. That lets you focus on writing the code.

Because of the pre-compilers, Harp is a powerful SSG, simple, and lightweight, and provides a customizable environment for building sites.

Key features:

• Harp lets you reuse common elements with partials, and maintain a consistent site design with layouts

• It’s fast, lightweight, and scalable

• Easy compilation of a project, such as a GitHub project or application, into HTML and CSS files and the ability to host them freely just the way you like it

Do Even The Best Static Site Generators Have Some Drawbacks?

Although static site generators are overally a great solution for building a website, they have some limitations.

Here are a few main disadvantages worth mentioning:

• Steep learning curve: while developers will find them easy and flexible to use, for marketers and non-tech savvy people it may be challenging, especially with the no-user-friendly interface. That may result in a complicated workflow because each time you’ll want to publish content and elements, the process of change implementation will take a lot of time, people engagement, and use of resources. Or you can simply hire people who know how to set up the static site generators properly, so that you won’t have to do it at all.

• Difficult file management: it may be hard to organize files without a unified content management system; in this case, you’ll need your dev team to organize files into directories and use batch processing scripts. Also, in opposition to traditional CMS, static site generators don’t provide different user roles so your team may be limited in accessing the content. Unless you implement a headless CMS – an alternative to Wordpress – which is a natural addition to static site generators in the Jamstack approach.

• Long build time: if you have a small site or application, this shouldn’t be a problem. But it gets tougher when the number of statically-generated pages increases – so does the build time. However, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and JavaScript frameworks have been significantly developed during the last years technical-wise, so this challenge is totally avoidable.

In general, the pros outweigh the cons, and using SSG for your website can boost performance and deliver your visitors a better experience. All you need is the right team.

Factors to Keep in Mind While Choosing A Static Site Generator For Your Project

Choosing the right SSG for your website is not obvious. It depends on many factors. Using a static site generator just because they’re popular isn’t exactly a good idea. If you go for SSG, you need to think it through and consider all the pros and cons.

And there are many aspects to study. The main things you need to think about include the following:

• Your site's primary function – is it delivering only static content, acting more as an application with various functions, or is it a site with many pages?

• Tools and web frameworks your dev team uses (if you have one)

• Complexity – your team will need dedicated tools and templates which may not always be suitable for the type of site you want to create

• Functionalities you want to include

• Industry and niche you're aiming at

• Your business needs and personal preferences as a business owner, and other business-specific factors

Choosing the wrong approach to web development may bring more harm than good and will result in poor website performance, bad user experience, and reduce your chances of attracting new customers.

Recap - The Significance of Static Site Generators for Your Business

Static site generators make it possible to quickly and effortlessly generate static or hybrid websites. They're fully interactive and ensure rapid loading time and the utmost performance at the same time. By combining SSGs with the Jamstack approach to web development, your business can gain leverage and provide tailor-made user experiences.

With many SSGs available, you have limitless possibilities and options for creating your perfect website.

And if you’re not sure which static site generator is best for your website and business type, we’ll be happy to help. As an eCommerce & web development services company with over 10 years of experience, we'll happily support you in choosing the most accurate technology for your business case.

Reach out to us and our team of professional web developers will help you build Jamstack websites tailored to your needs!