What are static site generators for?

Developers use static site generators to create very websites dynamically from text files and other code files. Static site generators are great for writing websites that do not have a great deal of dynamic and changing content. Static site generators produce sites that are primarily HTML and some CSS; the sites may or may not have JavaScript.

Static site generators make sites that load very quickly and are very small in terms of the data visitors’ browsers must download to show the website.

How do you use a static site generator?

Static site generators use a combination of JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and other code or languages to dynamically generate static web sites. Most of the text content for static site generators is written using Markdown, a “markup” language for writing text that can easily be displayed in different formats.

What is a markup language?

A markup language is a language that takes plain text and adds some additional special markers that other programs can read to understand how to display the text content. The markers inform programs how to format the headings, the paragraphs, specially formatted text, images, and other parts of the text content.

Example static site generators

JavaScript has a rich ecosystem of static site generators for developers to use to create static sites. Here is a list of some of the most popular static site generators:

• Eleventy
• Hugo
• GatsbyJS
• Next.js
• Jekyll