Static Sites & Deployment
A static site is a folder of files a server hands out unchanged, and it is how a surprising share of the web is built: documentation, landing pages, portfolios, generated reports, and anything a tool like Hugo, Astro or Eleventy produces. This category covers what belongs in that folder — index.html, assets, a favicon, robots.txt, a sitemap — and the traps that make a site work on your laptop and break the moment it is published, chief among them the difference between a relative and an absolute path. It also covers the vocabulary of getting it live: builds, artifacts, deployments, previews, and the single-page-application quirk that turns a shared deep link into a 404.
33 terms in this category
Absolute Path
An absolute path starts at the root and ignores which page is doing the linking — /assets/style.css, or a full URL like https://example.com/assets/style.css. Where the file sits relative to the current page makes no difference.
Asset Bundling
Asset bundling combines many source files into a few output files before a site is published. Dozens of JavaScript modules become one or two scripts; several stylesheets become one.
Atomic Deployment
An atomic deployment switches a site from the old version to the new one in a single step, so visitors never see a mixture of the two. Either every file is new, or every file is still the old one.
Build Artifact
A build artifact is the set of files a build produces — the finished HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images that actually get served. It is what you publish, not the source you edit.
Build Step
A build step is the command that turns source files into the folder a web server can actually serve. It runs before publishing, produces an output folder, and is not part of the live site.
Client-Side Routing
Client-side routing is when JavaScript in the browser decides which view to show for a given address, instead of the host returning a different document for each one. Links change the screen without a page load.
Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment means every accepted change is published automatically, with nobody pressing a publish button. A change that passes its checks goes live on its own.
Custom 404 Page
A custom 404 page is the page a site shows when someone asks for an address that does not exist, written by you rather than left to the host's default. It is returned with a 404 status code.
Deploy Preview
A deploy preview is a full working copy of a proposed change, published at its own temporary address so people can look at it before it replaces the live site.
Deployment
A deployment is the act of putting a new version of a site or file where the public can reach it. It is the moment the version you have been working on becomes the version visitors get.
Edge Function
A small piece of code that runs on a delivery network's own nodes, near the visitor, rather than at one central server. It suits redirects, headers and routing decisions — not heavy work.
Entry Point
The entry point is the file loaded first when something opens your site — for a web page, the HTML document the browser receives before anything else. Everything else is pulled in because that first file asked for it.
Favicon
A favicon is the small icon a browser shows for a site — in the tab, in bookmarks, in history and on a phone home screen. It is a file in the site, pointed to from the HTML or found at a fixed path.
index.html
index.html is the file a web server returns when a visitor asks for a folder rather than a named file. It is the default document for the site root and for every directory inside it.
Jamstack
Jamstack is an approach to building websites where pages are generated ahead of time and served as static files, and anything dynamic is added afterwards by JavaScript calling APIs. The initials stand for JavaScript, APIs and Markup.
Landing Page
A page built for one purpose, which people reach directly from an ad, an email or a shared link. It is judged by the share of visitors who do the one thing it asks.
Meta Description
A one-line summary of a page, written into a meta tag in the head of the HTML, that search engines often show as the grey text under a result. It affects clicks, not rankings.
Minification
Minification strips everything from CSS, JavaScript and HTML that a browser does not need — spaces, line breaks, comments, long variable names — leaving smaller files that behave identically.
Open Graph Tags
Meta tags in the head of a page that tell other sites how to draw a link to it — the title, the summary and the picture in a shared card. Without them a link shows as a bare URL.
Origin Server
The machine or service holding the authoritative copy of a site, which a cache asks whenever it does not already have what a visitor wanted. Origin is a position in a delivery chain, not a kind of software.
Relative Path
A relative path points at a file starting from the page that mentions it, rather than from the site root. It has no leading slash — styles.css, img/logo.png, ../fonts/inter.woff2.
robots.txt
A plain text file at the root of a site that tells search engine crawlers which paths they may fetch. It is a request that well-behaved crawlers honour, not a lock on the door.
Serverless
A hosting model where you deploy a function rather than a machine, and the provider starts it on demand and charges for the time it ran. There are still servers — you simply do not choose, patch or keep them.
Single-Page Application
A single-page application loads one HTML file and then rewrites the page in the browser as you navigate, instead of fetching a new document for every link. The address bar still changes; the page never fully reloads.
Site Preview
A look at a site exactly as it will be served, at a real address, before you send that address to anyone. It catches the faults that only appear once files leave your own machine.
sitemap.xml
An XML file listing the pages of a site so search engines do not have to find them all by following links. It aids discovery; it does not affect ranking.
SPA Fallback
An SPA fallback is a host rule that returns the site's index.html for any path matching no real file, so a single-page application can handle the address itself. It is what stops a deep link returning a not-found error.
Static Hosting
Static hosting is a service that stores a folder of finished web files and serves them over HTTP, without running any application code of yours. You upload the folder; the host answers requests for the files in it.
Static Site
A static site is a website made of finished files — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images — that are sent to the browser exactly as they are stored. Nothing is assembled on the server when a visitor arrives.
Static Site Generator
A static site generator is a tool that turns content and templates into a folder of finished HTML files. Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, Jekyll and Next.js in export mode are the common ones.
Web Analytics
Measuring who visits a site and what they look at. The two methods — a script running in the visitor's browser, or counting each request as it is served — produce different numbers, and neither of them is wrong.
Web Asset
A web asset is any supporting file a page pulls in once the HTML has arrived — stylesheets, scripts, images, fonts, icons, videos. The HTML is the page; the assets are everything it asks for next.
Web Server
The software that listens for HTTP requests and answers them with files or generated responses. Nginx, Apache and Caddy are web servers; something like them sits behind every address you have ever opened.