Static-site generators

In the early days of the web, most websites were basically static—written in text editors—and were rather rudimentary.

The next development to come along were content management systems (CMSes), such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. These relied on server-side scripts and stored all your content in a database. When a user visited a page, the CMS would query the database and serve a page to the user. These were a great deal more flexible and came with many more bells and whistles. At the same time, they had certain disadvantages. They could be slow, particularly under heavy traffic. They were also a popular target for hackers; particularly via the sometimes insecure extensions that owners used to extend the their sites’ functionality.

More recently, the pendulum has swung back in favour of static sites. Not only are they simpler, faster, and more secure, but modern client-side JavaScript means they have most, if not all, of the features of their predecessors. And, as the sources of these sites are text files, they can be organised and managed in the same way as code.