The fastest site in town is a folder of files

Every site I have shipped in the last two years is, at the end of the build, a folder of HTML files. No database. No server running application code. No runtime that has to boot before a visitor sees anything.

This sounds like a step backward to people who have been sold on platforms. It is not. It is what the platforms are hiding from you, badly.

Consider what happens when somebody visits a typical small business site built on a hosted page builder. A request hits a server. The server wakes up an application. The application queries a database for content that has not changed in eight months. It assembles a page from a theme, runs it through a plugin stack, and finally sends HTML. Best case, several hundred milliseconds. Worst case, the server was asleep and it is several seconds.

Now consider a folder of files on a CDN. The request hits an edge node in Jacksonville. There is a file there already. It sends the file.

The difference is not academic. It is the difference between a page that appears and a page that arrives.

What you give up. Content changes require a build. That is the honest cost. For a site that publishes daily it would be annoying. For a plumbing company that updates its service list twice a year, it is nothing.

What you get. It cannot go down because the database went down, since there is no database. It cannot be hacked through a plugin, since there are no plugins. It costs almost nothing to host, because serving a file is the cheapest thing a computer does. And it renders before any JavaScript arrives, which matters more every year as more of your traffic is a crawler that does not execute JavaScript at all.

The industry moved to dynamic sites because publishing needed it. Then it kept building dynamic sites for businesses that publish nothing, because that was the tooling everybody knew.

Most small business websites are brochures. Brochures should be files.