Why Choose A Hand-Coded (Static) Website? A Technical Overview

Website building solutions like WordPress can be a good solution for some businesses. When you want to run an e-commerce operation or be able to manage large amounts of content, they are a useful tool.

However, if you own a small business and need a website to display information about your brand and services, using a tool like WordPress is overkill and presents some notable drawbacks. Also, in the case of small business websites, a website that uses a framework will be less efficient and score lower on performance tests.

Dynamic Vs. Static Websites

A website created using a website builder like WordPress, Wix, or other site builders, is considered a dynamic website. This means that every time a visitor views it, the website has to communicate with a database, and then build and download all of the files before the visitor can interact with them.

Our websites (static websites) are self contained. The files in our websites can be loaded immediately, meaning that there is no lengthy building process going on in the background before a visitor can view the website.

Static Sites Offer Superior Loading Speeds

If your site loads slowly, visitors are more likely to abandon it and look elsewhere for the services you specialize in. A big advantage of a custom static site is that they are estimated to be up to 10x faster than the sites created by page builders.

Many site builders start with a one-size-fits-all solution, and then require plugins to customize a website design. The more plugins you use, the slower your site loads. Plugins also add extra maintenance and require regular updates.

Static Sites Offer Superior Customization Options

Most site-builder users want extra customization, which will likely force you to download plugins. You will also have to spend money to unlock many of them. Again, adding these plugins will likely hurt your website's performance, creating a trade off between design and performance. It also seems to be a common experience that no matter how much you fiddle with a page builder site, you might never quite get it to look the way you want.

Comparatively, our static websites offer high levels of website customization without sacrificing speed, performance, or significantly increasing the cost of the website.

Static Sites Offer Superior Mobile Performance

Mobile performance is a key factor in creating an excellent website.

1. An estimated 60% of all internet traffic comes from users on mobile devices.
2. A site optimized for mobile devices will seamlessly show all of your content regardless of how it is viewed. Websites that fail to do this will perform worse in search results.
3. As of July 2024, Google primarily uses the mobile version of a site to determine how to show it in search rankings (Mobile-First Indexing). A site with superior mobile performance and loading speeds will perform better in search results.

Dynamic (page-builder) websites can be much harder to optimize for mobile, and it is more difficult to fix any issues that could arise such as images not being shown correctly.

We have also run speed performance tests on a variety of websites made using page-builders and have consistently seen that, while the desktop version of the website performs acceptably, the mobile version of the website has much worse performance scores.

Static Sites Offer Superior Security

If you've ever visited a website and been immediately redirected away from it to an unexpected page, such as one of those scam pages that tells you your device is infected with a virus in big red letters, this is an example of web security gone wrong. It is likely that a hacker placed a few lines of their own code into the website that redirects all visitors away from it to their own phishing page.

Dynamic (page-builder) websites are more vulnerable to attacks from hackers and malware. Hackers can intercept a dynamic site's traffic as it is being built and prepared to be shown in a browser. This can let them inject their own code into the website. Similarly, if you use plugins with a site builder, every plugin will require regular security updates as they are constantly being patched against new security threats. This adds an extra layer of work to even keep a dynamic website running securely.

As static sites don't need to communicate with any servers to be viewed, they can't be directly attacked by hackers as there is no transmitted information for a hacker to intercept. This means that you don't have to worry about anyone changing your website's code or causing it to behave unexpectedly.

Similarly, our sites and the servers they are hosted on are highly secure. We host our sites using a reputable static website hosting service. This service offers high levels of security and encryption as well as redundancy to avoid website downtime.

Taking It To The Next Level

Now that we've covered static vs. dynamic websites, we'll briefly touch on the drawbacks of using frameworks.

Frameworks add Unused Code

Using a framework means that you'll have to download substantial amounts of extra resources and code, and will likely only use a small amount of it. This can slow a website down and make it more bloated. On the other hand, when we hand-code a site we only include the code that is needed for it to run and remove anything unused. This can greatly help our website performance.

If you are a large, well-established business then you will likely be less concerned with this drawback. However, for a small business, every bit of improved website performance can make a difference.

Frameworks add Extra Maintenance

Frameworks update regularly which means you may have to frequently update your website to ensure that it keeps running smoothly. Even worse, sometimes the companies that make frameworks go out of business or abandon them, which means you then have to consider rebuilding your website. This is why we prefer to stick to the core web development languages as it reduces our need to maintain our websites and lowers the risk of unexpected issues.