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Static and dynamic websites are two tricky phrases to understand. The easiest way to understand the differences is learning what makes a website static or dynamic. In this post, you are going to learn exactly that. Sometimes, we can’t say if a website is static or dynamic because it can be both when we consider it from a different perspective. For example, a website may look static when we look at it from the perspective of the visitors, but it used dynamic web development concepts to build it. Here we may not be sure of what to call to it. Don’t worry about it if you didn’t get my point. I will explain this later in this post below.
First, you need to understand what a pure static website is and what a pure dynamic website is. This will help you to understand what I said above.
Static Websites
Let’s start with the static website because it is easier to understand. The fundamental principle of the static website is the content on a static website is fixed or static. As a result, all visitors will get the same in all contexts.
The languages used to build pure static websites are
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- All visitors see the same content
- No blog
- No advanced features like commenting, forum or user accounts
- The website is not interactive
- No option to search
- No contact form
- You can open offline static web page documents in a web browser without a server
These are the qualities of a pure static website. It doesn’t need a database to store data. All the contents are included in the HTML document.
Based on this, some people say that a static website is something that is not built using web programming languages like PHP. It may sound true at first! But it is not completely accurate. Actually, you can make a static website using PHP or any web programming language if you want. But nobody would do that because web programming languages are not supposed to create static websites.
Some examples of the pure static websites
It is very difficult to find out pure static websites online today because most of the websites would have contact forms which make them dynamic websites.
Some web developers say that contact form and basic search function shouldn’t be considered while deciding whether a website is static or dynamic.
That is why I used the term pure static website. Before we discuss the static websites that are not pure static, we can check what pure dynamic website is. That will help you to understand ‘impure static websites’ better.
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="assets/css/main.css" />
</head>
<body>
<!-- Header -->
<header id="header" class="alt">
<div class="logo"></div>
<a href="#menu">Menu</a>
</header>
<!-- Nav -->
<nav id="menu">
<ul class="links">
<li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="generic.html">Generic</a></li>
<li><a href="elements.html">Elements</a></li>
</ul>
</nav>
<!-- Banner -->
<section class="banner full">
<article>
<img decoding="async" src="images/slide01.jpg" alt="" />
<div class="inner">
<header>
<p></a></p>
<h2></h2>
</header>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<img decoding="async" src="images/slide02.jpg" alt="" />
<div class="inner">
<header>
</header>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<img decoding="async" src="images/slide03.jpg" alt="" />
<div class="inner">
<header>
</header>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<img decoding="async" src="images/slide04.jpg" alt="" />
<div class="inner">
<header>
</header>
</div>
</article>
<article>
<img decoding="async" src="images/slide05.jpg" alt="" />
<div class="inner">
<header>
</header>
</div>
</article>
</section>
<!-- One -->
<section id="one" class="wrapper style2">
<div class="inner">
<div class="grid-style">
<div>
<div class="box">
<div class="image fit">
<img decoding="async" src="images/pic02.jpg" alt="" />
</div>
<div class="content">
<header class="align-center">
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</header>
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<footer class="align-center">
<a href="#" class="button alt">Learn More</a>
</footer>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="box">
<div class="image fit">
<img decoding="async" src="images/pic03.jpg" alt="" />
</div>
<div class="content">
<header class="align-center">
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<footer class="align-center">
<a href="#" class="button alt">Learn More</a>
</footer>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<!-- Two -->
<section id="two" class="wrapper style3">
<div class="inner">
<header class="align-center">
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<h2>Morbi maximus justo</h2>
</header>
</div>
</section>
<!-- Three -->
<section id="three" class="wrapper style2">
<div class="inner">
<header class="align-center">
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</header>
<div class="gallery">
<div>
<div class="image fit">
<a href="#"><img decoding="async" src="images/pic01.jpg" alt="" /></a>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="image fit">
<a href="#"><img decoding="async" src="images/pic02.jpg" alt="" /></a>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="image fit">
<a href="#"><img decoding="async" src="images/pic03.jpg" alt="" /></a>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div class="image fit">
<a href="#"><img decoding="async" src="images/pic04.jpg" alt="" /></a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<!-- Footer -->
<footer id="footer">
<div class="container">
<ul class="icons">
<li><a href="#" class="icon fa-twitter"><span class="label">Twitter</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="icon fa-facebook"><span class="label">Facebook</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="icon fa-instagram"><span class="label">Instagram</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#" class="icon fa-envelope-o"><span class="label">Email</span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="copyright">
© Untitled. All rights reserved.
</div>
</footer>
<!-- Scripts -->
<script src="assets/js/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="assets/js/jquery.scrollex.min.js"></script>
<script src="assets/js/skel.min.js"></script>
<script src="assets/js/util.js"></script>
<script src="assets/js/main.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
Dynamic Websites
In dynamic websites, the contents are stored in a database. When the user requests for a web page, the server fetches the required content from the database and send it to the browser. Dynamic web pages will contain requests for data from the database. For example, if there is a blog on a website, all we need to do is enter new posts on the database when we want to publish a new post on the blog.<
Since your blog will dynamically pull out the posts from the database and publish them reverse chronologically, your last published post on the database will appear first on the blog. Similarly, when the visitors post comments below your posts, they will be saved on your database. These comments will be displayed under post dynamically.
You don’t have to make any change to make those changes appear on the website.There are many more characteristics of a dynamic website. Before that, we can check some examples.
- When you open this URL on a fresh browser, it will give the Signup the page.
- But, when you open the same URL after you logged in into your Facebook account, it will give you a different page
- When your friends do the same with their account, they get a web page with different contents
- This is a simple example to explain to you that the content on a dynamic web page can be different in different contexts.
Examples of dynamic websites
- Most of the websites that you use daily are dynamic websites.
- Social media network websites like Facebook and Twitter
- Blogs, news websites, and online magazines
- Forums like Quora and Reddit.
- E-commerce websites like Amazon,
Characteristics of Dynamic Websites
Contents on the same page may change from user to user Advanced features like a forum, social networking, e-commerce, blog Interactive websites A server is needed to parse the dynamic web pages/documents
The web developer can program a dynamic web page to give different data for users based on particular parameters.
Here is an example,The URL http://facebook.com may give different results based on the context.
- When you open this URL on a fresh browser, it will give the Signup the page.
- But, when you open the same URL after you logged in into your Facebook account, it will give you a different page
- When your friends do the same with their account, they get a web page with different contents
- This is a simple example to explain to you that the content on a dynamic web page can be different in different contexts.
Content Management Systems vs Dynamic Websites
A post about dynamic website will be incomplete without mentioning content management systems (CMS). A CMS is a platform that helps people to build and manage dynamic websites easily. WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and WiX are some of the major CMS platforms out there.
The major part of a CMS is its user-friendly dashboard which can be used to update or modify the content on the website.
CMS dashboard will have columns and controls to enter the data and modify the data. Using this, we can change the content of the database. When we do this, the changes we made to the database will reflect on the website.
Benefits of CMS
Change the content on the database using an easy-to-use dashboard
Learn more on CMS &
HTML
- WordPress Vs HTML
- CMS Better Than HTML
Static Websites Using CMS
CMSs are designed to build complex dynamic websites like blogs and e-commerce websites. Most of the companies needed a blog on their website, and so they began to use CMSs to build websites. CMS became a trend, and everyone began to use it whether they needed it or not. As a result, there are many websites which don’t have any characteristics of a dynamic website which is actually using the principles of dynamic website.In CMSs, content is dynamically pulled from the database. The content on a page is saved on a database instead of including it to an HTML document. Some websites built on CMS use this functionality to add contents to their web pages because that is how CMS works.
Technically, this is a dynamic website because when a user request for a page:
the server pulls the required data from the database,
it creates a page and sent it to the browser
But when we consider it from the perspective of the visitors, this is not a dynamic website at all. The website doesn’t have the characteristics of dynamic websites like:
Different content for different users
Blogs, forum, contact form, etc
So, for a user, this website is not dynamic at all. It is similar to a static website. However, the website used some elements of dynamic websites to generate ‘static content.’ We hope now you have a better grasp of the difference between static and dynamic websites
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