When most people think "business website", they think WordPress. It's the default — and for a lot of agencies, it's the easy option that keeps the maintenance retainer ticking.
We think differently. For the majority of Irish business brochure sites — the kind that showcase your services, explain what you do, and get people to contact you — a static site is a better choice in almost every way.
Here's what we use, how it works, and why it matters for your business.
What Is a Static Site?
A traditional CMS-driven site like WordPress works by building each page on demand. When a visitor lands on your homepage, the server queries a database, runs PHP code, assembles the HTML, and sends it back. Every. Single. Time.
A static site works differently. The pages are pre-built as plain HTML files and sit on a server ready to be served instantly. There's no database query, no server-side code running, no moving parts to go wrong.
The result: your website is faster, more secure, and cheaper to host — often completely free.
The Stack We Use
Here's exactly what powers this site and the sites we build for clients.
Eleventy (11ty) — the Static Site Generator
Eleventy is the engine that builds the site. It takes our templates and content files and compiles them into plain HTML.
It's built with Node.js, which most developers already have installed. It's fast, flexible, and has no opinions about how you write your HTML or CSS — you're not locked into any framework or component library.
For a brochure site, the workflow is simple:
- Pages are written as Nunjucks templates (
.njkfiles) — essentially HTML with a few extra features like shared layouts and variables - Blog posts are written as Markdown (
.mdfiles) — plain text with simple formatting syntax - Run
npm run site:buildand Eleventy compiles everything into a_site/folder of pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Nunjucks — Shared Layouts
The real power of a static site generator is layouts. Instead of copying and pasting the navigation and footer into every single HTML page (and updating them in five places when something changes), you define them once in a layout file.
Every page on this site uses base.njk — a single template that contains the <head>, nav, and footer. Change the nav once, it updates everywhere. This is how it should work, and it's genuinely one of the biggest quality-of-life improvements over hand-coded static HTML.
Markdown — Writing Blog Posts
Blog posts live in site/blog/posts/ as .md files. Each one has a small block of frontmatter at the top — title, description, date, category — and then the content in plain Markdown.
---
title: "Your Post Title"
date: 2026-01-15
category: Web Design
---
Your content here. **Bold**, *italic*, headings, lists — all supported.
Eleventy reads these files, runs them through the post layout, and outputs a fully styled HTML page at /blog/your-post-slug/. No database, no CMS login, no plugin updates required.
Plain CSS and JavaScript
There's no CSS framework, no React, no build pipeline beyond Eleventy itself. Just well-organised vanilla CSS and a small JavaScript file that handles the mobile nav, scroll animations, the FAQ accordion, and the contact form submission.
This means the site loads fast, has zero JavaScript framework overhead, and will still work perfectly in ten years without any dependency updates.
Hosting on Cloudflare Pages — Free, Fast, Global
This is where it gets really good for businesses watching their costs.
Cloudflare Pages hosts static sites for free — permanently, not as a trial. You connect your GitHub repository, point it at your _site/ output folder, and every time you push a change, Cloudflare automatically rebuilds and deploys the site in under a minute.
What you get on the free tier:
- Unlimited bandwidth — no traffic charges regardless of how many visitors you get
- Global CDN — your site is served from Cloudflare's 300+ data centres worldwide, meaning fast load times from Dublin, London, New York, and everywhere else
- Free HTTPS — SSL certificate included and auto-renewing, no configuration needed
- Custom domain — connect your own
.iedomain at no extra cost - Automatic deployments — push to GitHub, site updates in 60 seconds
For a typical small business brochure site, the hosting cost is literally zero. Compare that to €10–20/month for managed WordPress hosting that still requires you to do updates, handle security patches, and worry about plugin conflicts.
Contact Forms — Web3Forms
The one thing static sites can't do natively is process form submissions, because there's no server-side code. The solution is a lightweight third-party service.
We use Web3Forms, which is free for up to 250 submissions per month — more than enough for most business enquiry forms. You add a hidden field with your access key, point the form at their API endpoint, and they email you the submission. Done.
No plugin, no database, no spam filter to configure. The contact form on this site works exactly this way — submissions go straight to your inbox.
For higher volumes or more complex requirements (CRM integration, conditional logic, file uploads), there are paid alternatives, but for a straightforward "get in touch" form, Web3Forms is unbeatable for the price.
Why This Is the Right Choice for a Business Brochure Site
Let's stack it up directly.
Speed
Static HTML served from a CDN is about as fast as a website can get. There's no server-side processing, no database queries, no plugin overhead. A well-built static site will score 95+ on Google PageSpeed Insights without much effort — and as we covered in our Core Web Vitals article, that directly affects your search rankings.
Security
WordPress sites are constantly under attack. Automated bots scan the web looking for outdated plugins, known vulnerabilities, and weak passwords. It's not a question of if — it's when.
A static site has no login page, no database, no server-side code. There's nothing to hack. The attack surface is essentially zero.
Cost
| Static Site | WordPress (Managed) | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Free (Cloudflare Pages) | €10–20/month |
| SSL Certificate | Free | Usually included |
| Contact Form | Free (Web3Forms) | Plugin or paid service |
| Maintenance | Minimal | Regular updates needed |
Reliability
With no moving parts, there's very little that can go wrong. WordPress sites go down when the server has issues, when a plugin update breaks something, or when the database gets corrupted. A static site on Cloudflare's global network has essentially 100% uptime.
Developer Experience
For us as developers, working with Eleventy is a pleasure compared to WordPress. We're writing clean, structured code without fighting against a CMS. The build process is fast and predictable. And because everything is in plain files, it's easy to version-control, review, and hand over to another developer if needed.
Is a Static Site Right for Every Business?
Mostly yes, with some caveats.
A static site is ideal if your website is primarily informational — services, about, contact, blog. This describes the majority of small and medium Irish business websites.
You might need something more dynamic if you:
- Run an ecommerce store with a product catalogue and cart (Shopify is usually the right answer here)
- Need user accounts and authenticated content
- Have a large content team who need a GUI-based CMS with granular permissions
For everything else — and that's most brochure sites — static is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than the WordPress alternative.
Building Your Site This Way
If your current website is slow, expensive to host, or constantly needing maintenance, we'd be happy to talk through whether a static site rebuild makes sense for your business.
The approach we use — Eleventy, Cloudflare Pages, Web3Forms — costs nothing to run once it's built, performs excellently in search, and is easy for us to maintain and update on your behalf.