Static site generators are really good for blogging sites. You generate site once and you simply serve generated HTML files using HTTP server.

There are at least a few dozens of static site generators. For this blog, I have chosen to use Jekyll, because it is quite popular and well documented.

Why should you consider static websites

Static site load times are fast because you don’t waste time to render a web page for every request. Also by using a static site, you totally skip other layers like database.

For some people, static blog might look too static because you can’t add dynamic content. The most common example is comments. The easiest way to solve this problem is to use a 3rd party comment library. E.g Disqus. Of course,if you don’t like 3rd party libraries for privacy reasons you could develop REST API for comment management and implement comment rendering in JavaScript.

Another thing I love about static websites is versioning. Because your content is just a bunch of markup files you can easily version your website using your favorite versioning system e.g. git, mercurial.

The deployment process is a breeze when you are using git or other versioning systems that allow executing commands after you push code to the repository. After pushing your code to the remote, it triggers a command to generate static site and after a short period of time, your changes are live.

Why I have chosen Netlify as my blog hosting?

Netlify CDN. Netlify hosts your website in multiple servers that are located in different geographical locations. This minimizes load times for users because content is a served from the server that is nearest to their geographical position.

Netlify is easily configurable you can select which branch you want to deploy on git push. You have access system ENV variables. Also, it should support a wide variety of site generators, because you have access to change the command that builds your site.

On top of easy deployment, you get ability to rollback your site to the previous version using web interface.

It even has a prerendering option for single page apps. It should help Google web crawlers to scan your dynamic site.

One click SSL certificate configuration using Let’s encrypt. I’m a huge fan of Let’s encrypt.

And all these features are accessible for free.

Final thoughts

I only scratched the surface of features that Netlify provides. But I really like the simplicity and ease of use of their service.