Is SSG Faster than CMS? Dries Says No

Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, deals with a very important topic in his latest blog post. In the blog, he writes about the advantages of Content Management Systems (CMS) over Static Site Generators (SSG). CMS and SSG are both tools for managing web content and generating web pages. The static site generator tool essentially automates coding individual HTML pages.

However, the static site generators present the user with few pre-built templates and no user-friendly interface. Proponents of SSG claim that static sites are ‘much faster’ than CMS. According to Dries, this is misleading. He claims that his Drupal-powered website https://dri.es/, is faster than most static sites. The sites that he compared include those of leading static site generators.

According to him, the site is the fastest because its HTML/CSS/JavaScript is the simplest and quickest to load up. Drupal also optimizes performance with lazy loading of images by which the loading of images is deferred to a later point in time. 

According to Dries, a website’s performance depends more on the HTML, CSS, JavaScript code, and digital assets than the underlying technology. He minces no words in criticizing the workflow of SSG. Drupal allows users to swiftly edit the site’s structure and see the effects upon saving them. At the same time, editing an SSG site is a complex task, the blog post says.