Static Website Services

Static websites are safer, faster, and cheaper than dynamic websites. And with the growing number of static site generators available, you can get the best of both worlds: dynamic templates rendered locally but pre-built and served as flat, static files in production.

A growing ecosystem of static website services helps mimic most of the features of a dynamic website, including user authentication, accepting payments, forms, emails, and even admin/CMS’s similar to WordPress.

In fact there’s even a phrase for this approach, JAMStack, given its growing popularity.

Below is a curated list of services to help you launch a robust static website.

Table of Contents

• Static Site Generators
• Static Hosting
• Static CMS
• Search
• Comments
• Live Messaging
• Newsletters
• Forms & Surveys
• Analytics
• Maps
• Payments
• User-Generated Content

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Static Site Generators

• Gatsby - ReactJS-powered.
• Jekyll - Ruby-powered, popular, many plug-ins.
• Hugo - Go-powered, fast.
• Pelican - Python-powered.
• Cactus - Python and Django-powered.
• Lektor - Python, file-based, CMS.

Static Hosting

• Netlify - Continuous deployment, CDN, and CMS. Highly recommended.
• Now - Fast, global deployments.
• Amazon S3 - Granddaddy of static hosting especially combined with CloudFront for a CDN.
• Github Pages - Free Github hosting.
• Aerobatic - Static hosting for Bitbucket.
• Forge - Drag-and-drop interface via Hammer Mac app.
• surge - Single-command publishing.
• GitLab Pages - Free GitLab hosting.

Static CMS

• Contentful - API-first CMS.
• Cloud Cannon - Cloud CMS for Jekyll.
• Forestry - CMS for Jekyll/Hugo sites.
• Lektor - Mac Desktop app CMS.
• Pulse - Flat-file CMS.
• Prismic - API-based CMS backend.

User Authentication

• AuthO - Universal auth for all platforms.
• GoTrue - API for registration and authentication.

Search

• Algolia - Fast, powerful search-as-a-service.
• Google Custom Search Engine - Custom Google Search for your site.

Comments

• Disqus - Easy to use, embeddable, email notifications.

Live Messaging

• Drift - An AI-powered messaging app.
• Intercom - Customer messaging app.
• Olark - Live messaging app.

Newsletters

• MailChimp - Email marketing.
• MailGun - Transactional email API.
• SendGrid - Marketing and transactional email.
• Drip - Ecommerce emails.

Analytics

• Google Analytics - Free website analytics.
• Heap - “Capture Everything” analytics.
• MixPanel - Mobile analytics.
• Segment - Collect all your customer data in one place.

Forms and Surveys

• FormSpree - HTML only to receive emails.
• Google Forms - Free Google-powered forms and surveys.
• SurveyMonkey - Easy-to-use and free surveys.
• TypeForm - Beautiful embeddable forms.
• WuFoo - Simple online forms.
• Form.taxi - Reliable backend for HTML forms.

Maps

• Google Maps - Ubiquitous, easy to embed.
• Mapbox - Beautiful and customizable maps.

Payments

• SnipCart - HTML/Javascript powered shopping cart.
• FlatMarket - Free, open source e-commerce platform for static websites.

User-Generated Content

• StaticMan - Requires Jekyll + Github Pages but very powerful and cool.

See something that’s missing? Email me and I’ll add it to the list.