When I rebuilt my personal site, I wanted it fast and simple. That meant static.
I evaluated the major static site generators—Gatsby, Eleventy, and their Vue and Svelte equivalents. Gatsby’s ecosystem was tempting, but then I read that React/Gatsby sites ship 138kb of JavaScript to the client just to render a blog post.
That’s hard to justify.
The No-JavaScript Challenge
I went the opposite direction: build a blog with essentially no frontend JavaScript. The result? Pure HTML and CSS, with a tiny instant.page snippet for link preloading.
No frameworks. No hydration. Just content.
The Tradeoffs
Static sites aren’t right for everything. But for content-focused sites like blogs and portfolios, the performance wins are significant:
- Faster time-to-first-byte
- Better Core Web Vitals
- Simpler deployment and hosting
- Lower maintenance burden
Update: This site now runs on Astro, which takes this philosophy even further.