SSG Site Pros

• Developer-Focused: Hand-coding websites is a pain in the Lance Bass. It's fun to be artisanal for a second, but once you get into dozens (hundreds, thousands) of pages, it becomes frustrating and confusing. On the dynamic side, manipulating WordPress and Squarespace to do all you know is possible can be frustrating (I know that the folks who work on these teams work very hard to improve dev experience as it's a weak spot in most dynamic site generators).
• Separation of Concerns: SSG sites maintain the separation of visual presentation and content. You can continue to write new content as Markdown files without manually applying styling to it as you would with a hand-coded static site.
• Reusable: Global changes to templates (e.g., blog post template) and components (e.g., navigation) are made by editing one file instead of many.
• Metadata: One of the most powerful aspects of SSGs is that it surfaces the metadata: the title of the page, published date, site taxonomy, hero image, etc, can be defined and changed without touching the templates themselves, reinforcing the separation of concerns. Metadata is surfaced in something called front matter, which allows the content maintainer to add and customised data to the literal front of their file. (I'll talk more about this and show examples when we dive into Eleventy's structure in part II.)
• Lean: As with a static site, the delivered files are what they are. It takes up less room on the internet, which is minimalist and aligns with our designer ways (rerolls turtleneck collar).
• Fast: Lessening the number of server requests means your site will be faster, which improves your SEO and user experience, providing better access to more users.
• Economic: Most SSGs are free to set up.
• Asset Management: On static sites, asset management is largely manual; you might run individual photos and CSS files through some processes. On dynamic sites, image handling is automated and quite dialed in by way of plug-ins and platform-wide support. Most SSGs include some sort of process for assets, including compiling, transpiling, minifying, and bundling assets. SSGs provide build processes for anything from photo management (serving appropriately sized images) to CSS minification (rewriting your CSS into what the browser needs to read rather than what's optimal for developers to read).
• Build Customisation: Most SSGs allow you to manipulate how the build process happens. So, if you want to see the site refresh live as you make edits, that's usually possible. If you want to check for specific linting processes, that's possible too.