Nothing is faster than a file that already exists. A statically generated page can be served from an edge location near the visitor, cached indefinitely, and does not fall over when traffic arrives, because serving it costs almost nothing. For content that is the same for everybody — marketing pages, documentation, case studies — there is rarely a good reason to render it per request.
The constraint is that the content has to be known at build time. Anything genuinely per-request — a logged-in dashboard, a live price, search results — cannot be static, and the useful architecture is usually a static shell with the dynamic part fetched separately, rather than making the whole page dynamic to accommodate one component.
Related terms
Hydration
The step where JavaScript takes over server-rendered HTML in the browser and makes it interactive.
Core Web Vitals
Google's three field metrics for loading, responsiveness and visual stability, measured on real visits rather than in a lab.
LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
The moment the biggest piece of content in the viewport finishes rendering — in practice, when the page looks loaded.
The bench this belongs to
Full-stackIf you can describe it, we can build it. React and Next.js on the front, Python or Node behind, Postgres underneath, shipped to somewhere you can afford to run.
