Here’s a question we ask almost every new client: how often does your website actually change?
Not how often you wish it changed, or how often you plan to update it. How often does it genuinely need new content, new pages, or structural changes? For most corporate and professional services websites, the honest answer is somewhere between “a few times a year” and “barely ever.”
And yet, the vast majority of these websites are running on dynamic platforms — WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other content management system — with databases, server-side processing, login portals, plugin ecosystems, and monthly maintenance overhead. All to serve what is, functionally, a handful of pages that rarely change.
There’s a better way.
What “dynamic” actually means
A dynamic website is one where pages are assembled on the fly. When someone visits your site, a server receives the request, queries a database, processes templates, assembles the HTML, and sends it back to the browser. This happens on every single page load.
That architecture makes sense when content changes constantly — think news sites, e-commerce platforms, or social media. But for a corporate website with an About page, a Services page, a Contact form, and a handful of other pages? It’s like hiring a full-time chef to make toast.
A static website, by contrast, is pre-built. The HTML already exists as complete files, ready to be served instantly. No database. No server-side processing. No assembly required.
Why simpler is better
The advantages of a static site aren’t marginal — they’re substantial.
Speed. Static files served from a global edge network like Cloudflare load in a fraction of the time. There’s nothing to compute, nothing to query, nothing to wait for. Your site loads in milliseconds, not seconds — and that matters for both user experience and search rankings.
Security. Every dynamic website has an attack surface: a login page, a database, an admin panel, a plugin ecosystem. Static sites have none of these. There’s no back door to exploit because there’s no back door. Automatic SSL and DDoS protection from Cloudflare handle the rest.
Cost. No CMS licence fees. No plugin subscriptions. No monthly maintenance retainer to keep everything patched and updated. The infrastructure costs for a static site are minimal — a fraction of what you’d pay to keep a dynamic platform running.
Reliability. Static files don’t crash. There’s no database connection to fail, no PHP process to run out of memory, no plugin update to break your layout at 2am on a Sunday. The site either exists or it doesn’t — and on Cloudflare’s network, it exists everywhere.
The question isn’t whether your website can be dynamic. It’s whether it needs to be. If your content changes a few times a year, you’re paying a significant premium in complexity, cost, and risk for a capability you almost never use.
What about updates?
This is the most common pushback, and it’s a fair question. If there’s no CMS, how do you make changes?
The answer is straightforward: you ask us. We handle updates quickly and affordably. Most changes — new text, updated images, an additional page — take minutes, not days. And because AI-assisted tools like Claude accelerate our workflow, the cost of a change is a fraction of what it used to be.
For most businesses, paying for occasional updates as needed is dramatically cheaper than maintaining a dynamic platform year-round for changes that happen a few times a year.
When dynamic does make sense
We’re not dogmatic about this. Some websites genuinely need a CMS. If you’re publishing content regularly — blog posts, news articles, property listings, case studies — then a managed CMS like Webflow is the right call. We build those too, and we’re happy to recommend that path when it fits.
The point isn’t that dynamic websites are bad. It’s that they’re often the wrong tool for the job — chosen out of habit or assumption rather than genuine need.
The bottom line
If your website exists to tell people who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch — and the content changes a handful of times a year — you almost certainly don’t need a dynamic platform. A beautifully designed static website, hosted on a global edge network, will be faster, more secure, cheaper to run, and easier to maintain than any CMS-driven alternative.
Sometimes the smartest technology decision is choosing to use less of it.