PHP has a Static Site Generator

Until now there was no Static Site Generator for PHP that really won me over.

With Stenope that has changed. So let me use this happy occasion to talk about the world of Static Site Generators.

And at the end of this article I'll show you how to build wonderful, blazing fast websites with Stenope.

What is a Static Site Generator?

Glad you asked! A Static Site Generator produces static HTML. Nothing more, nothing less.

Usually the data — blog posts, for instance — is kept in a text-based format like Markdown or JSON and turned into pages on demand.

The HTML that comes out of it is always static, which is to say unchangeable. Every single person in the world ends up seeing exactly the same page.

The idea is anything but new. HTML was made for precisely this purpose. In its early days the web was a collection of static HTML pages that people everywhere could reach.

Well-known Static Site Generators like Hugo or Gatsby have been around for a long time, and they are mostly used by tech-savvy people who are willing to keep their content in Markdown and version it with Git.

By now there are Content Management Systems (CMS) that at least offer this approach (Statamic), or go all in on it (TinaCMS). The idea is to combine the strengths of static HTML with those of a Content Management System. Static Site Generator is usually shortened to SSG.

What are the advantages of a Static Site Generator?

A Static Site Generator saves time and money. It makes your website faster, because the static HTML can go straight to your visitors' browsers with nothing in between. And the static HTML brings plenty of other advantages with it:

Once rendered, static HTML needs no programming language like PHP or Python.
Static HTML can live on a Content Delivery Network (CDN), so it needs no server of its own.
Serving static HTML costs you very little, often nothing at all.
Static HTML is very secure — because there is essentially nothing there for anyone to hack.
Static HTML is blazing fast — because it caches beautifully. In the browser as well as on a CDN.
Static HTML itself knows nothing of updates or security patches. It's nothing but documents — not a complex application like a WordPress system.
Static HTML is long-lived. It just sits there on the web, and it will still be sitting there in ten years — without anyone lifting a finger.

Is a Static Site Generator right for my website?

Let's say you run a company website on WordPress. You were handed the credentials to your admin area, and from there you can maintain your own content.

There's just one catch. Can you guess it? A problem you may not even be aware of. Do you really maintain your content? You could do it any time — but you hardly ever do, or you stopped doing it altogether.

I'm not blaming you. Your website is finished, after all. The world has kept turning since.

The problem now is that you're paying to run a complex application on the internet whose main purpose is to let you maintain content without having to hire anyone. And that, paradoxically, is exactly what landed you in an expensive dependency on your agency. Does this sound familiar?

There are studies showing you're not alone in this.

For the SIINDA Landscape Study of 2018, for instance, a lot of German small-business websites were examined: for 42 percent, the last change to the content lay more than a year back, and only 23 percent had been touched within the previous month. Even pages that rank on the first page of Google are updated on average only every two years, according to an analysis.

So let's imagine your company wants to change something once a year — upload a new team photo, say, or publish a blog post about an award the company won. Then a Static Site Generator is a perfect fit. Your content is static — so static HTML is the most honest and most efficient answer for you and your business.

The following signs tell you that a static HTML website suits your company better than a Content Management System.

You barely ever log into your system, and you keep forgetting your credentials.
Your CMS is too complicated for you, so you call your agency even for changes the CMS was supposed to let you make yourself.
Your system costs you too much, and you wonder why a simple company website runs up that much every year.
Your system is too slow for you. You may already have moved servers and installed a performance plugin, and your site is still slow.
You want no more system updates. Every few years your CMS runs out of support, and the migration costs nearly as much as building it again — for what is essentially static HTML.
You want to feel good about it. Maybe you've been the target of an attack once, and you never want to fear again that your company website ends up a billboard for somebody else's junk.

Why are there so many websites built with a CMS?

If you have ever worked with an agency that relies on a Content Management System, you may already suspect why a different tune is sung there. They would rather not hear about Static Site Generators. Instead they talk up how easily you can maintain your website with the CMS. They show you shiny dashboards with endless possibilities and wonderful plugins.

That it also sells expensive maintenance contracts, upgrades to newer versions, relaunches and optimizations is no coincidence — it's the core of their business model.

There is also the wish for an all-purpose tool. Agencies want something that covers simple websites and complex systems alike. So the CMS quickly gets used for anything and everything and is declared the holy grail.

It also makes a handy selling point, and something that builds trust. The CMS is essentially the core of the agency, and a CMS lives off the many agencies that sell it.

But would you buy yourself a truck, service it, insure it and pay the running costs — just so you can pull it out of the shed you built specially for it once every year or two? You can transport anything with it. From a tiny shoulder bag to truckloads of potting soil. Do you think that's absurd? It is!

But doesn't static HTML leave me just as dependent on an agency?

If you have no wish to edit your content in Markdown yourself, and no wish to get involved with Git versioning, you'll most likely need a technician's help for your changes.

In that case, though, you're paying purely for the changes — and not for the running costs of a complex system. In other words, you're now paying for honest work and real value.

My clients now get an MCP connection to their website if they want one. That lets your AI chatbot manage the content of your site — including preview links with optional password protection. If that sounds interesting. Just get in touch. Then I'll show you what I mean.

Does static HTML have drawbacks too?

Static HTML is wonderfully suited to millions of company and portfolio sites, but of course it has its downsides.

Dynamic content

As the name suggests, static HTML isn't dynamic by nature. Every page has to be rendered in advance.

That becomes obvious as soon as many different combinations of the same page are possible — as with this course catalog.

Nobody can really know which combination a visitor will filter and sort by — categories, venues or prices.

You can solve this with JavaScript and tricks like hidden data embedded in invisible HTML tags. It's still ugly and a little hacky, though. And it isn't great for SEO either.

So for things like that, a simple web application is the right choice. And I don't mean a CMS — just because a website has one central dynamic element doesn't mean it needs WordPress.

Content with an expiry date

The same problem applies to the course catalog mentioned above. Pure static HTML would be showing hopelessly outdated courses twenty years from now.

This problem can be solved too. You can set up a scheduled pipeline, for instance. It renders your static website again at regular intervals and so keeps your data current.

You might be thinking: once your website depends on a regular rebuild, you're dependent again on a system that has to still be running years from now.

That's true, of course. But this system is much smaller than a CMS, and you pay the price on purpose, for something you actually need. A good developer will pick a Static Site Generator that will still render your pages reliably years from now.

On top of that, HTML already sitting on the web is untouched by any of this. In the worst case your content would simply stop being updated. A CMS website whose server has a problem would suddenly start throwing ugly crashes, getting slower, or worse.

No protected areas

Static HTML is a real win for a lot of websites. If you want an area where you can look at all your courses, though, like this one, static HTML is unfortunately not an option. For an admin area like that you need a web application.