Content is resolved at build time
When you open an article here, no server asks a database what the article says. The answer was already written down - as a plain HTML file - the moment the site was built.
The pipeline
- Write - an article is a Markdown file with frontmatter, colocated with its images.
- Build - the static build runs every content query once, on the build machine: listings, the featured pick, previous and next links.
- Serve - the edge serves files. Nothing renders per request.
What this buys
| Concern | Static answer |
|---|---|
| Latency | CDN cache hit, no origin render |
| Availability | The site survives a database being down |
| Cost model | Serving files, not running compute |
| Content correctness | What you published is what you serve |
The table above is the honest list. Static generation is not the right answer for every product surface, but for reading surfaces it is hard to beat.
The trade we accepted
Publishing is no longer instant: content changes land with the next build. For a blog, that is the right trade - a deploy takes minutes, and in return the reading path never waits on a runtime query.
A page that renders from files cannot have a slow query. The class of outage simply does not exist for it.
The URL model post covers how these files end up at clean, localized addresses.