Great post! I'm actually working on Dhow right now, a Node.js SSG that lets you write JSX syntax (similar to next.js with getProps & getPaths functions) but generates pure HTML. It's currently a work in progress but I would love to hear what you think!

npx create-dhow-app my-app # Optionally specify a template like this: `--template blog`
# For older versions of npm
npm i -g create-dhow-app
create-dhow-app my-app

# make a directory for your project
mkdir my-app
# change your directory
cd

I think Next.js is very good for this. Without almost any tooling you can just do next build && next export to generate the static site. And then you have the option to switch to dynamic by doing next build && next start. And for the dynamic version, if you are worried about React size you can just replace it to Preact (3kb with the same api).

Ok so if I understand well, you make the case for using no framework when building mostly static website that don't ship much dynamic content and interactions.

I don't understand why is it so important to reduce bundle size to a minimum if, anyways, loading the framework is not required to interact with the page (if you used pre-rendering/server-side rendering).

Plus, I think you overlooked the fact that declarative components are easier to maintain and make evolve than imperative DOM manipulations. Maybe you'll save 0.5~1 second of the life of each of your visitors but it will take you 2x or 3x the time when it comes to adding a new feature after some time (in my opinion).

Still a well written articles with good examples though. Thank you for sharing.

Ohhh I wouldn't say that! I agree that Gatsby can be a bit heavy-handed for certain projects, but it strikes a neat balance between stateful clientside logic and static rendering. For that reason, I think it's basically a replacement for create-react-app for full-scale projects. It's also great for running your API calls ahead-of-time so you don't ship API keys to the client.

Yeah I noticed nunjucks in their docs! Decided to talk about Pug here since it had my heart since my CodePen days, but that looks like a super capable templating lib too. Glad to hear your success with 11ty btw!

This is an awesome post! thank you, Ben!
I've had a lot of similar realizations lately while building out static sites. The developer experience of React and similar JS frameworks are great, but at the end of the day, we should be optimizing for the user's experience, not our own.

Tools like 11ty do get you close to the same DX, and with some tuning, I'd argue you can get even better DX than you would with most react setups (throw a dash of Webpack/Parcel in there, some Typescript maybe, Preact.js or Svelte to keep the bundle size small if you really need something dynamic. )

The more I learn about software development, the more relevant "choose the right tool for the job" becomes. I think for static sites you hit the nail right on the head. Solid read 🙏🏻

Great post Ben, couldn't agree more! I've pushed Hugo to break up components in a similar way and it worked well, but you have to use go templates. I need to spend some time with 11ty! Also cool to see your Pug project, thanks for sharing!

I absolutely agree with you : generating HTML should not involve such boilerplates and JavaScript has its caveats concerning SEO as well. There is just something missing which makes me stick with React (unfortunately), styled-components.

Fantastic article Ben! Thanks for introducing me to Pug. Sounds a bit like Handlebars if I'm not mistaken?

Hi, enjoyed your article! I wanted to get report of your website via Lighthouse (btw it has high score) and found one thing that might improve SEO :)

not a single mention of "offline" in the article, comments or sign up process for "dev.to".

big bummer!

i never used gatsby, and i'm not really well versed into most of the web coding platforms of the past 5 years or so... (is this hydrate thing exactly the offline feature i am mentioning below?)

but gatsby website works amazingly well offline, like every website should!

the test is very simple. load website (on android, in my case). turn off internet. reload page.

at very least what's visited should work!

(i would argue that a small website should load everything in the first hit, and i would bet gatsby can do that easily too... or at least i hope, since i'll still probably migrate from jekyll there, even after this article to which i can certainly agree... because...)

sadly, 11ty or any other related link i could find, doesn't (except mozilla nunjucks work a little bit). just another "fuck offline first" broken mentality, imho.

also... i don't really get the "better and faster" for small sites... even jekyll can score 100% for those sites in every possible test there is. so what's really the point?

not to mention both the language and the pug dog are ugly as the devil! 🤣

by all means, have fun with them...

(i know i'll soon get my own fun by deleting facebook, perhaps inspired by the 11ty affiliate... not because of privacy concerns at all, as you can read on cregox.net/privacy nor because whatever they do wrong in policies... it's just because most of their products are truly bad as a product on their own. in a similar fashion, i'm tempted to delete google as well... they always made fantastic products, but they've been losing their touch... plus, both of them lack this one other fundamental part of the internet: making my data redundant automatically, which means outside of their reach, for real backup... and better options are starting to appear, such as secure scuttlebutt).

just please, implement some offline code already! and ideally some pwa along, you know, to easily "install" or download everything for later offline usage with intent, or simply for bad connection.

I'm another 11ty fan. Only used for my portfolio site so far (used it to add a blog) and love the flexibility it brings by allowing multiple templating languages. I use EJS with a mix of Nunjucks. Makes it much easier to update static sites without resorting to a full-stack web app or heavy CMS like WordPress.

Looking forward to trying out Netlify CMS in combination with Eleventy.

Well said!

I had the same thought a while ago.. First thing that scared me off was the size of the node modules. Second was the build process - slow! Third was some react compatibility issue I encountered when installing the modules.

For someone trying to create a blog - I believe that's an overkill when there is 11ty!

What about Gatsby image? Maybe my site could have been probably done with html and vanilla js, but how can I get my sweet blur lazy loading? Honest question

Awesome take on the subject and just what I needed. This gave me a better idea of when is worth using react for some client projects. I have been using Eleventy + nunjucks + netlify CMS for static sites for a while. You've inspired me to look into Pug now.

Very nice and refreshing article. Slowly but certainly, voices like yours are surfacing... I always missed the simple times and believe that they are just around the corner with web components. Those don’t care, if they are loaded in a static context with it’s innerHTML present or if “on connected” they find their inner structure is missing something and fetch /render by convenience. This will make it no effort to prerender and hydrate as its natural behavior but then they are extremely light and super fast in the DOM as native web api, that you may find the conclusion => that the site is fast enough. LOL 😂

Anyhow, I work on an event driven solution making lots of things easy and stuff like state machines obsolete, all vanillaJS without dependencies: github.com/Weedshaker/event-driven...

consider this for your next project. 🥳🤙

True!

Pug + AlpineJS + Tailwind + Eleventy = ❤️

I built mkws.sh/ because I felt tired of JavaScript. It's a bloat-less simple static site generator.

Pretty neat. Was about to say that Out templating looks VERY similar to Haml