Static websites

A website that is ready before your visitor knocks.

Most sites run on WordPress. It builds every page again on every visit, while the content hardly ever changes. A static site does that work once, when it is published. After that every page is simply a file.

Get started See the measurements

One visit

What happens when someone opens your site

WordPress

  1. The server starts PHP
  2. PHP loads WordPress, the theme and every plugin
  3. It connects to the database
  4. Dozens of database queries: page, menu, settings, widgets
  5. The theme puts the HTML together
  6. The page goes to the visitor

Again on every visit, even if nothing has changed since yesterday.

Static, at Spaicely

  1. The nearest CDN location already has the page ready
  2. The page goes to the visitor

The building happened once, when your AI published the site.

Measured

How fast the first byte arrives

We opened the home page of 19 Dutch business sites on WordPress (bakers, hairdressers, physiotherapists, installers, gardeners) and of two static sites at Spaicely, seven times each. Each bar is one site; shorter is faster.

  1. 20 ms
  2. 29 ms
  3. 30 ms
  4. 37 ms
  5. 39 ms
  6. 42 ms
  7. 44 ms
  8. 46 ms
  9. 52 ms
  10. 53 ms
  11. 63 ms
  12. 102 ms
  13. 175 ms
  14. 190 ms
  15. 193 ms
  16. 427 ms
  17. 441 ms
  18. 729 ms
  19. 1,696 ms
  20. 1,748 ms
  21. 1,982 ms
Time to first byte per site, in milliseconds

The middle WordPress site needs 102 ms, six of the nineteen take more than 0.4 seconds and the slowest almost 2 seconds. The static sites: 37 and 46 ms.

A few WordPress sites are just as fast. They use a cache: a plugin or service that keeps a ready-made copy of every page. That is in effect a static site, with WordPress behind it that you still have to update and secure.

Then the rest of the page

After the first byte come the images, stylesheets and scripts. A WordPress theme with plugins loads a lot of them. Below, the middle WordPress site from the measurement next to spaicely.com, also a static site, animations and all.

Page loaded
1,467 ms108 ms
Weight
2,150 kB109 kB
Files
7013
Scripts
263

spaicely.com runs on our own server in Germany, not on the CDN. For visitors further away a customer site at Spaicely is faster still.

Security

What isn't there can't leak.

A static site has no login page, no database and no code that runs when someone visits. There is nothing to update and nothing to break into.

39.5%
of all websites run on WordPress (W3Techs, 1 November 2026). That makes it the biggest target on the internet.
11,334
new vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes in 2025, 42% more than the year before (Patchstack).
91%
of them were in plugins. WordPress itself had six. Every plugin is someone else's code running on your server.
0 updates
You never have to update a static site. No software runs that can go out of date.

Static isn't dull

Everything a business site needs

Static only says how the pages are delivered. What a visitor needs to do, we handle separately and safely, outside your site.

A contact form, a download or donations on your site too? Here is how →

How we measured

On 1 November 2026, from a fibre connection in the Netherlands. First byte: seven times per site with curl, the middle value counts. Load time, weight, files and scripts: three times per site in Chromium without a cache, the middle value counts. The WordPress sites are ordinary sites of Dutch businesses; we don't name them. Sources: W3Techs and Patchstack.

Let your AI build a fast site.

Get started

Create an account and connect your AI. Then just say what you want: a site, a domain, a contact form.

Already using Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini? Add Spaicely as a connector with this address: https://mcp.spaicely.com/mcp