About StaticGen

StaticGen is a leaderboard of the top open-source static site generators. It’s run by Netlify, a hosting and automation service for static websites and apps, as a way to promote a static approach to building websites.

The site itself is built with Middleman. Every day Netlify builds and deploys the site. The source-code is available on GitHub and you’re more than welcome to contribute as long as you follow the rules.

Static Site Generators

People sometimes ask if static sites make sense for anything beyond a one-pager. This leaderboard highlights the top open source projects, in many different languages, that make static sites not only viable, but an attractive option for creating sophisticated websites!

The typical CMS driven website works by building each page on-demand, fetching content from a database and running it through a template engine. This means each page is assembled from templates and content on each request to the server.

For most sites this is completely unnecessary overhead and only adds complexity, performance problems and security issues. After all, by far the most websites only change when the content authors or their design team makes changes.

A Static Site Generator takes a different approach and generate all the pages of the website once when there’s actually changes to the site. This means there’s no moving parts in the deployed website. Caching gets much easier, performance goes up and static sites are far more secure.