Before you invest in static site generation

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Before you spend anything on static site generation, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Static files are the fastest and cheapest thing to serve
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

No server means dramatically less to attack or patch. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Rebuilds can be automated on every content change. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

How to tell if yours is fine

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about static site generation before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Rebuilds can be automated on every content change — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.