Why I'm still on a static site

This site, the one you are reading, is a static site. It is built once on Netlify when I push to git, and the resulting HTML is served directly. There is no database. There is no CMS. There is no admin panel. Articles are written in MDX, in a folder, in the same repo as the rest of the site. To publish, I run git push.

I get asked, with mild concern, why I do not use a “proper” platform. Substack. Ghost. WordPress. The answer is short.

A static site is the cheapest thing I run. Netlify’s free tier covers more traffic than this site has ever generated. I have paid Substack a hundred pounds in a single month for less control. The maths is not subtle.

A static site does not break. Or rather, when it breaks, it breaks in ways I caused, and I can fix them. There is no plugin auto-update that took the comment system offline. There is no platform pricing change that quietly increased the floor by 40%. The dependencies are git, Node, and a handful of npm packages, all of which I can read.

A static site is, more than anything else, a piece of writing rather than a product. The platforms are products. They have product roadmaps and product priorities. They will, eventually, do something the team thinks is in your interest, that you do not want. A static site has no roadmap. It does what it did last year, and the year before, and the year before that, until I change it.

The cost of choosing this path is that I have to know a small amount of code. This is not as much of a barrier as it sounds. I write MDX, which is markdown plus the occasional embedded component. I have written perhaps fifty lines of CSS in the last six months that did not come from a Tailwind class. The amount of code I need to write to keep this site running is roughly the amount I would write in a paid CMS to customise the theme.

The stack, for the curious: Astro for the build, Tailwind for styling, Pagefind for search, Netlify for hosting, GitHub for version control. All of those are either free or in the cheapest paid tier. The whole thing costs me perhaps £20 a month, almost all of which is the domain renewal.

If you are running a personal site on a paid platform and feeling the friction, this is the alternative. It is not for everyone. It is for me.