Static Site Generation

SSG is like a printed brochure. The content is set when it leaves the factory (at build time), and visitors just grab a copy. Nothing is made on the spot. So it's fast and cheap, and it can sit on a static hosting service or CDN without a server running all the time.

It suits pages whose content doesn't change often: marketing sites, docs, blogs, landing pages. The downside is that every content update means rebuilding and redeploying. If each user sees different content (like a personal orders page), pure SSG doesn't fit. You'd fetch the data with JavaScript after the page loads, or switch to SSR.

Next.js, Astro, VitePress, and others support SSG. The key difference from SSR is when the HTML gets built: SSG at build time, SSR on every request.