Editing Web design (section)

==== Static websites ====
{{Main|Static web page}}
A static website stores a unique file for every page of a static website. Each time that page is requested, the same content is returned. This content is created once, during the design of the website. It is usually manually authored, although some sites use an automated creation process, similar to a dynamic website, whose results are stored long-term as completed pages. These automatically created static sites became more popular around 2015, with generators such as [[Jekyll (software)|Jekyll]] and [[Adobe Muse]].<ref>{{Cite web
  | last = Christensen| first = Mathias Biilmann
  | title = Static Website Generators Reviewed: Jekyll, Middleman, Roots, Hugo
  | website= Smashing Magazine| access-date = 2016-10-26| date = 2015-11-16
  |url=https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/static-website-generators-jekyll-middleman-roots-hugo-review/
}}</ref>

The benefits of a static website are that they were simpler to host, as their server only needed to serve static content, not execute server-side scripts. This required less server administration and had less chance of exposing security holes. They could also serve pages more quickly, on low-cost server hardware. This advantage became less important as cheap web hosting expanded to also offer dynamic features, and [[virtual machine|virtual server]]s offered high performance for short intervals at low cost.

Almost all websites have some static content, as supporting assets such as images and style sheets are usually static, even on a website with highly dynamic pages.