New Year, New Website

With the start of the new years comes a new face-lift for the Fractal IT website.

Our website is now powered by the free open-source software Hugo, which is a static site generator.

What is a Static Site Generator

When a website user lands on a page whose assets are stored in a traditional content management system (CMS)—such as WordPress or Joomla—the site has to assemble data from its database dynamically, process the content through a template engine, and finally display the page to the visitor.

A static site generator grabs the content, applies it to the right templates, creates static HTML, and quickly delivers the formatted content to the user. There is no dealing with databases or any other external data sources—avoiding opportunities for security breaches and time-consuming server-side processing.

A CMS makes an excellent solution for businesses where marketing users need a styled interface to input and edit content, where loading time isn’t a priority, and where there are no plans to distribute content across various channels and platforms.

Meanwhile, a static site generator is a perfect fit in an environment where lightning-fast content delivery is critical, where several departments need to work on the same campaigns autonomously and simultaneously, and where a content delivery mechanism is necessary for supplementing a headless CMS that prioritizes omnichannel distribution.

Benefits of Static Site Generators

Improved performance, security and ease of use are just a few of the reasons static site generators are so appealing.

The purpose of website generators is to render content into HTML files. Most are “dynamic site generators.” That means the HTTP server—i.e., the program that sends files to the browser to be viewed—runs the generator to create a new HTML file every time an end user requests a page.

Over time, dynamic site generators were programmed to cache their HTML files to prevent unnecessary delays in delivering pages to end users. A cached page is a static version of a web page.

Hugo takes caching a step further and all HTML files are rendered on your computer. You can review the files locally before copying them to the computer hosting the HTTP server. Since the HTML files aren’t generated dynamically, we say that Hugo is a static site generator.

This has many benefits. The most noticeable is performance. HTTP servers are very good at sending files—so good, in fact, that you can effectively serve the same number of pages with a fraction of the memory and CPU needed for a dynamic site.