Production Pre-Rendering

In an ideal world, a static website generator rebuilds its webpages independently, depending on content changes: if the webpack bundle is modified, you rebuild every webpage, but if it’s a tiny sentence modification, you only want to rebuild the corresponding webpage.

The reason is simple: the more processing you do, the longer the build time and the more server resource you need. Having full control over the build process reduces running costs.

The difference might appear negligible for small websites at first, but not when it’s compounded over months, if not years of production environment. Properly done, pre-rendering websites should make them virtually free to publish and maintain: they don’t require much power to generate, almost none to serve when using a content delivery network and a web server like Nginx, and very little data transfer with offline caching using service workers.

Static web frameworks are still in their infancies. With 35% of the web being powered by Wordpress, there is an incredible opportunity to drive costs down while reducing the global electricity consumption. We only need new frameworks to try new things and make this dream a reality.

JAMStack is great to build simple websites, but it’s not a solution for every web engineering problem. We can, however, integrate most its principles to more traditional tech stack to achieve incredible results.