When to Use Static Generation v.s. Server-side Rendering

*I left both this post and the ‘Two forms of Pre-rendering’ post because personally, they are fascinating.

Note: This is originally a pre-rendered blog post from Next JS. I have added my own thoughts at the end of this blog

We recommend using Static Generation (with and without data) whenever possible because your page can be built once and served by CDN, which makes it much faster than having a server render the page on every request.

You can use Static Generation for many types of pages, including:

• Marketing pages
• Blog posts
• E-commerce product listings
• Help and documentation

You should ask yourself: “Can I pre-render this page ahead of a user’s request?” If the answer is yes, then you should choose Static Generation.

On the other hand, Static Generation is not a good idea if you cannot pre-render a page ahead of a user’s request. Maybe your page shows frequently updated data, and the page content changes on every request.

In that case, you can use Server-Side Rendering. It will be slower, but the pre-rendered page will always be up-to-date. Or you can skip pre-rendering and use client-side JavaScript to populate data.

As the article says above in things that can be generated statically, this blog is a an example of Static Generation. The plan is to use Static Generation along with Server-side Rendering in the future for more complex projects.