A Static Site Compared with a CMS

Maybe your website runs on WordPress, or on django CMS, which you can install on djangoeurope with one click. Both run here just fine. And yet, for a new website, we recommend something lighter: a static site generator.

A CMS runs a database, an admin interface and a login, all so that people can edit text without touching code. In the age of AI agents, that problem is going away. You don't edit your website anymore. You ask your agent a quick favour.

An example conversation: a person asks their AI agent to change the support hours on the contact page. The agent changes one line, opens a merge request with a preview, the person approves it, and the change goes live less than a minute later.

What a static site generator does

A static site generator turns text files, mostly Markdown and a few templates, into plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The result is a folder of files that any web server delivers as they are. There's no database, no admin interface and no code running on the server when someone visits.

  • Astro
  • Hugo
  • Eleventy
  • Pelican
  • MkDocs
  • Jekyll

Same task, two ways

On the left, what you tell your agent. On the right, what you do yourself in a CMS.

  1. Fix a typo

    Static site and your agent

    “There's a typo in the heading of the pricing page, please fix it.”

    CMS

    1. Log in to the admin
    2. Find the page in the page tree
    3. Open the editor and fix the word
    4. Save, preview, publish

  2. Add a page

    Static site and your agent

    “Add a page about our new office in Lyon, with the facts from the attached PDF, and link it from the about page.”

    CMS

    1. Create a page and pick a template
    2. Copy the text in, paragraph by paragraph
    3. Upload and crop the images
    4. Add it to the menu
    5. Edit the about page to link it
    6. Publish both

  3. Undo a mistake

    Static site and your agent

    “Yesterday's change to the about page was wrong, please revert it.”

    CMS

    1. Hope that page versions were switched on
    2. Find yesterday's version and restore it
    3. Or restore the whole database from a backup

  4. Review before publishing

    Static site and your agent

    “Show me the change first.”

    CMS

    1. Set up a draft and approval workflow, often with a plugin
    2. Ask a colleague to look at the draft in the admin

  5. Keep it secure

    Static site and your agent

    “Nothing to ask: there's no admin, no login and no code running on the server.”

    CMS

    1. Update the CMS, its plugins and the database regularly
    2. Protect the admin login against attacks
    3. Back up the database

Version control is the database

On a static site, every change is a commit in Git: who changed what, when and why. You review a change before it goes live, you see exactly what differs, and you undo it with one command. Automated checks can test every change for broken links and invalid HTML before anyone sees it.

That's a history most CMS installations never have. Our own terms of service show what it looks like when every version and every change is kept.

Ask your agent a quick favour

Telling an agent "please add this" isn't a technical skill. It's how you'd ask a colleague. The agent edits the source files, opens a merge request, and you look at the result before it goes live.

This website works exactly like that. It's built with Astro and lives in Git, and in just a few days an AI agent moved over all the content of our old website and added new pages, in more than 40 merge requests. A person reviewed and merged each one.

But what about non-technical editors?

They're the ones who gain the most. Instead of learning an admin interface, they write a sentence. And as agents get direct access to a website's source code, which is only months away for most tools, nobody has to touch a file at all.

Where a database still belongs

Content that changes by itself, such as orders, user accounts, comments or stock levels, does need a database. But that's not a case for a CMS. It's an application, and that's what Django is for. Many projects combine both: a static website for the content, and a Django application for everything that's interactive.

Static sites on djangoeurope

Your own nginx web server delivers static files fast and without anything to patch. Let your CI pipeline build the site and upload it over SSH on every merge. And if you'd still rather run a CMS, WordPress runs here too, and the one-click django CMS installer is there for you.

Coming soonConnect your Git repository, and we build and publish your static site automatically.

deploy:
  script:
  - npm ci
  - npm run build
  - rsync -a --delete dist/ myshop@myshop.example.com:~/website/

Less to run, more to show

Host your static site, your Django application, or both.

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