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, most notably accepting user input and—WordPress’s killer feature—an admin/CMS for non-developers.

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

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

Static Hosting

• Aerobatic - Static hosting for Bitbucket.
• Amazon S3 - Granddaddy of static hosting.
• Forge - Drag-and-drop interface via Hammer Mac app.
• Github Pages - Free Github hosting.
• Netlify - Continuous deployment, CDN, and CMS.
• surge - Single-command publishing.
• GitLab Pages - Free GitLab hosting.
• PubStorm - Free custom domains, SSL, and CDN.

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.

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.
• Facebook Comments - Embeddable Facebook comments.

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.

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.

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.