Top React Static Site Generators to Use in 2024

With the advent of the digital world, every business wants to have an online presence. Therefore, they choose online platforms for gathering their targetted audience and acquiring their own brand. Those online platforms are basically websites or applications. Normally websites come in two different types static and dynamic. Static sites are with stable content while Dynamic sites change their content.

Static sites are more favorable than dynamic when you only want to deliver the content over the internet. These are mostly used by bloggers and content focussed owners of web development. Static sites minimize the cost and improve the performance and speed of development.

Therefore, we have many technologies, which offer us static site generators to develop static sites. Among those technologies, today we will look at React static site generators. Reactjs is the most demanding library/framework of Javascript, best known for developing interactive UIs. It is loved by many developers because of its excellent features. It also offers numerous static site generators for developing web applications.

So, before moving ahead, we will have an overview of some basic understanding of static and dynamic sites.

Static sites vs Dynamic sites

Static websites are called flat or stationary pages. They display their content in the web browser, exactly the way it is stored. It stays the same for every viewer. While Dynamic site changes their content frequently depending on various factors such as viewer, time zone, country language, etc

Static sites does not require any programming languages logic and database connections. They are easier and simple to create. While Dynamic sites require programming languages and database design to change the content of a site.

Generally, static sites load quickly, and due to this, they are preferable. While dynamic sites take time to load their data.

What are Static Site Generators?

Static site generators or SSGs are commonly used for developing static content sites and make the content easy for usage. SSGs allow you to create HTML pages ready for the HTTP server without the need for server-side rendering. There are various programming languages like Ruby, Reactjs, and Java that offer you to create static sites.

So, Let’s know, why should we think of React for building SSGs

Why React with Static?

React.js is a component-based client-side application development tool, which is used to create excellent user interfaces. Server-side rendering by React reduces single-page application performance costs and UX penalties for users. The static websites of Reactjs require no server maintenance and even they perform much better for Google indexing.

Reactjs’ ability to pre-build HTML enhances the loading speed and makes it the best framework for building SSG sites. Its granular approach makes you change your file by only editing one component file.

Advantages of React Static Site Generator

Below are the advantages of using React static site Generator

Loading Speed

Dynamic websites built using a Content management system, fetch the information from the databases, whenever a user makes any query. This process may consume a lot of time and causes a delay. But, a website built using a static site generator, provides compiled files at the browser. In this way, SSG’s sites load faster and enhance user interactions with your site.

Security

Static HTML pages are not connected with any of the databases. So, any cybercriminals can’t perform any crime like SQL injections or any server-side attacks. This way it significantly brings down the security risks.

No backend

While building a website with a static site generator, you don’t need any connection with the database and server. You can directly deploy your site on CDN i.e content delivery network, which improves the performance of the site

Flexible and Scalable

Websites built using SSGs do not have any connection with the database, which enhances both performance and speed. This flexibility ensures quick results. When you host your site on CDN, all the pages of your site can serve in multiple places, which improves the scalability.

Low Maintenance

Websites with static site generators have no concerns with databases and servers, meaning they are less to bother and can be appropriately maintained. Moreover, they even save development costs.

Disadvantages of React Static Site Generators

SSGs are having some set of disadvantages too, let’s look at those

Steep Learning Curve

Static site generators that are not fully like plug-and-play options, you should have some coding knowledge too, to maintain those sites. Therefore, learning customization might be difficult, it’s not easy at all, you have to invest your time to learn them.

No User Management

SSGs have no inbuilt option for user management, which means new users can’t register to sites and create new content. To apply this, you have to use Custom CMS, which is another issue to maintain.

Development Time

The major disadvantage of SSG is development, which means the total time taken to build a site. It depends on the number of sources. More number of page means more time will be needed to build the site.

File Management

During static sites, you have to manually interact with the file system.

Things to Keep in Mind While Choosing SSG for Website

Choosing SSG for a website is not easy, because it depends upon a number of factors. While choosing SSG, you must aware of its advantages and disadvantages. There are a number of aspects to keep in mind while choosing SSG for the website.

So, here look at the following aspects

Main Goal of a Website

The main goal of a site is only to deliver static content, rather than application functionalities. Then you should prefer to build static sites.

Tools and Framework

Consider the tools and framework, you are going to use for generating static sites. You should have a proper understanding of those tools and frameworks for developing SSGs.

Features

Pen down the features, that you want to include in your static sites.

Complexity

Your development team will require some specialized tools, which would not be applicable to your site. They may lead to increase complexity.

Business Requirements

This is the most important point to consider while making any site. As a business owner, you should consider all your business preferences and requirements first.

If you fail to choose the right approach for building any site, It can make you more loss than profit. You can have poor user experiences, which can decrease the number of targetted audiences. So, it is very crucial to select the right approach first.

If you are unsure, of how to choose the right approach, then you should contact the best software development company, which can assist you with the proper guidance.

Best React Static Site Generators

Static sites are considered best for application development. If you choose Reactjs for building SSG, then you get myriad options for building. So, here we are presenting the list of best React static site generators, which can help you to build amazing and content-rich websites.

Gatsby

Gatsby is the best-chosen option for building static sites. It is an open-source static site generator built on top of Nodejs using Reactjs and GraphQL, which is a powerful plugin for building APIs and services. . It provides over 2500 plugins to create static sites.

Gatsby offers several beginning templates and follows PWA(Progressive Web Apps) principles. The highly customizable Gatsby helps you to build static websites fast, by loading only the critical parts of your web pages. It significantly increases your page loading speed as it supports varieties of sources to pull content from GraphQL.

It is considered the modern frontend framework, which uses static files for faster loading of pages.

Features of Gatsby

Contains maintained and excellent documentation
Effective code splitting
Heavy images optimizations
Offers quick performance
Offers a high level of scalability and flexibility

Advantages of Using Gatsby

Incredible performance

Gatsby works differently from other CMS like WordPress. Instead of running the code on the server, it tells the browser what to generate. The static assets are pre-rendered by Gatsby before the user arrives, which is called pre-rendering.

In this way, no time is wasted on waiting for server response time. This increases the page speed and makes the performance faster.

Seo-Friendly

SEO is used for optimizing the search engine. The Gats BY development team has made a lot of efforts to make this framework pass Google’s core web vitals.

The correct use of metadata, quality of content, structured data, and the number of backlinks are the considerations of core web vitals. But, Gatsby offers SEO-friendliness by providing a number of plugins and structured functionality for the website.

Gatsby performs out-of-the-box well with all the SEO tricks and tips and shines in almost any kind of web development technology with proper configurations.

Security

Gatsby is a serverless technology, therefore the security attacks are minimal. Therefore hackers don’t typically target Gatsby sites.

Extensive Plugins and Integrations

The Gatsby plugins are very extensive. The plugin and integration library saves the custom development time, as it allows the user to add any number of features with a few lines of code.

Next JS

Next.js is an open-source Javascript framework, which has been created by Zeit for developing static applications. It is based on Reactjs and Javascript. It offers the best delivery experience by providing all the necessary requirements for production.

Rendering Reactjs applications has never been easier with the Next js server. Moreover, you don’t require any prerequisites like Node js server or web pack configurations.

Features of Next js

Built-in CSS support
hybrid static & server rendering, TypeScript support
No configuration needed
Built-in image component and automatic image optimizations

Advantages of Using Next JS

Data Security

As Next.js is a static site generator, therefore it has no connection with databases and servers. This ensures data security and prevents sites from various security attacks.

Great Adaptability and Responsiveness

Using Next.js, a great user experience can be achieved. Next js sites are highly responsive which means applications adjust to the total screen size.

Faster time to market

Next.js is a great choice for creating MVPs because of its extensive components. It allows you to build fast and get feedback quickly, which improves the product without wasting both time and money.

Omnichannel

Websites and applications created with Next js can run on every device. So, that you can sell your products from every medium.

Also Read this article: Next.js VS Nest.js

HUGO

HUGO is an open-source static site generator build using Golang programming languages. It can be easily used within React js applications. It is one of the best front-end Web development trends, offering over 300 attractive themes for building an application.

The best benefit of using HUGO is it takes less than one millisecond for a page to load, which enables the user to get the entire website in one second. It supports various operating systems including Windows, Linux, macOS, and others. It is used by thousands of blogs and websites across the world, for generating powerful content.

Features of HUGO

Offers powerful theming
Renders changes with live reloading
Powerful building
Extensive theme options
Supports various hosting platforms

Advantages of Using HUGO

Increased Revenue

Google does not rank those sites which take more than 3 seconds to load. That means more the loading speed, the higher will be your ranking. Therefore, HUGO stands unique from others, in delivering content within 1 second, which is highly beneficial for your marketing

Fast Building Time

HUGO is one of the fastest SSGs and builds the website within a short time. It allows you to build your site as quickly as possible and push it live.

Runs Anywhere

HUGO seamless runs anywhere. You don’t require any databases, administration, or interpreters. You can create HUGO software to build and run your site.

SEO-Friendly

HUGO offers various in-built SEO requirements like titles, meta-tags, and descriptions. It even allows you to develop SEO-Friendly marketing sites by setting up complex requirements without any hassle.

React Static

It is fast and powerful static site generator of React js. It is relatively new and has been built by React team of developers to overcome the issues of other SSGs in order to provide the best developer experience to users.

It was built for SEO and supports the entire React ecosystem, containing out-of-the-box functionality and features. It has a shorter learning curve and enables faster data streaming from the source to the route. It’s a simple setup and migrations make it a favorite among many developers.

Features of React Static

Enables fast building and performance
Offers best developer experience
Easy project setup and migrations
Built for SEO
Supports 100% React eco-system

Advantages of Using React Static

Security

Just like regular static site generators, React Static has no connection with servers and databases, which automatically makes it more secure.

Speed

Since the React static is composed of full-features React applications. So, there is no need to load any resources when the user interacts with the site. It enhances the user response time.

Scalability

React static offers scalability and performs well with everything from single pages to larger sites with thousands of pages.

Cuttlebelle

Cuttlebelle is an open-source static site generator, which uses React js for layouts. It separates the editing and code concerns, which makes it a good option for enabling non-technical people to change the content. It is super easy to set up also.

You can expand the possibilities of Cuttlebelle while using it with React components. By using this framework, Javascript XML can be generated, layouts can be composed, data can be fetched from external APIs, and testing can be undertaken easily, as well as deployment without risk.

Features of Cuttlebelle

Separates the code and content
Modularizes each page into partials
Focusses on content and simplicity
Offers easy templating
Based on YAML language

Advantages of Using Cuttlebelle

Easy to change the content

Cuttlebelle is mainly designed to change the content easily. Even any nontechnical person can change the content easily without any coding experience.

Based on YAML language

Cuttlebelle uses YAML language, which is a human-friendly data serialization language. It used YAML because it is close to plain English and data can be easily get. Unlike others, it has no curly braces to write.

Markdown

It contains Markdown, which is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for content writers. It allows you to write easy-to-read, easy-to-understand plain text which can be converter into HTML further.

Phenomic

Phenomic is a modular compiler that helps you to build static websites, where React js is used as a renderer and Webpack is used as a bundler. Phenomic is different from other static site generators because it lets you choose from different libraries and frameworks according to your project.

By using this SSG, the developer will have experience in building full-blown websites and applications. You can build high-performing SEO-friendly websites by using Phenomic. It offers you the best user experience by immediately serving the pre-rendered HTML files to their first-visit users.

Features of Phenomic

Website built with Phenomica has a lightening fast as UX
Provides best user experience
100% SEO friendly
Based on React and Webpack system

Advantages of Phenomic

You can Build the Website with the things you like

Phenomic lets you choose from varieties of options and framework, that you want to use for your project

100% SEO friendly

It lets you deploy static files on any static hosting platform. This way the site becomes SEO-friendly and can be optimized for fast rendering.

Static Site generator like no other

It helps you to build static websites with a modern approach, and you will make a website in the same way you build an application.