What is Static Site?
A website served as prebuilt HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, with no server-side rendering at request time.
Definition
A static site consists of files generated ahead of time—by hand or by a static site generator like Astro, Hugo, Eleventy, or Next.js export—and served directly from a CDN or object storage. With no application server or database in the request path, static sites are fast (cache hits at the edge), cheap to host on Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, or S3+CloudFront, and present minimal attack surface. Dynamic behavior comes from client-side JavaScript calling APIs, the pattern branded Jamstack. The limitation is content freshness: rebuilds are required on change, which incremental static regeneration and on-demand revalidation were invented to soften.